Not ruined beyond recognition, not collapsed into a heap of stones, but simply gone from the surface of the earth, leaving no visible trace at ground level. That absence is itself the most striking thing about it.

The site sits within a rath, a roughly circular earthen enclosure of the kind built in early medieval Ireland, most often associated with farmsteads, and it adjoins a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, where unbaptised infants were interred in unconsecrated ground. The pairing of a small church with such a burial ground is not unusual in Kerry; what is unusual here is how quickly the physical evidence disappeared. A collection of local school manuscripts from the 1940s recorded that ruins of a little church could still be seen in Timothy McCarthy's field in Killeen. Yet by 1941, members of the Co. Kerry Field Club visited the area and found no trace of the ancient church buildings at all. The two observations sit uncomfortably close together in time, suggesting either that the remains were already very slight and easily missed depending on conditions, or that they vanished within a remarkably short period.