The surveyors recorded it dutifully on the six-inch map, naming it "Site of Kilcavan Church" with the resigned precision of people documenting an absence rather than a presence. What remains today is subtler still: a gentle rise in the pasture on a west-facing slope above a stream, the kind of slight swelling in the ground that only makes sense once you know what you are looking for.

The OS Letters of 1838, compiled as field notes to accompany the great mapping project of that decade, describe the remains in blunt terms, with the description later published by O'Flanagan in 1928. The church would once have sat within an enclosure, a roughly circular or oval boundary of the kind commonly associated with early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where the sacred precinct was defined as much by its perimeter as by any building within it. That enclosure is also recorded, though like the church itself it survives only as a trace in the landscape. What does survive in more legible form is a crude Latin cross, a simple upright stone with a crossbar rather than any elaborate carving, which has been built into the field boundary immediately to the south of where the church once stood. It is the kind of object that gets absorbed into the practical life of a farm over generations, repurposed as a boundary marker, its original significance neither forgotten nor quite remembered.