What makes this one stranger still is that it earned its most enduring local name not from any saint or landlord, but from a cluster of whitethorn bushes. By 1840, when the Ordnance Survey fieldworkers came through, the place was known simply as Teampall na Sceach, the church of the bushes, and the name stuck because several large whitethorns were still growing there among the levelled foundations. The rectangular graveyard surrounding the ruin sits within the southern quadrant of a much larger oval-shaped ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of early medieval boundary that often predates the church building itself, marking out a sacred precinct long before any stone was laid.

The church's formal name, Cill Fhíonnachta, translates roughly as the cell or church of Fionachta, a figure the Ordnance Survey letters cautiously describe as someone believed to have been a saint. The site appears in the documentary record as far back as 1201, recorded as Kyllanatan, and turns up under a succession of variant spellings across the following centuries, including Keilinoghtan and Kyllynoghtie, as noted by the antiquarian T. J. Westropp writing in 1904 and 1905. A 1418 ecclesiastical document records a dispute over the church, suggesting it was at one point claimed by the prebendary of Kilbekan before passing into the bishop's control. The parish itself sits within the historic territory of Pubblebrian, a barony in County Limerick, and boundary references in the Civil Survey place the site mearing, that is sharing a boundary, with Knockdrowmessill.

When the Ordnance Survey visited in 1840, the foundations measured approximately 14 metres long by 6 metres wide, and nothing more substantial was visible above ground. That situation has not improved since. The outline of the church remains detectable today on aerial photography, though on the ground the site offers very little to orient a visitor beyond the graveyard itself and, in season, those whitethorn bushes. The enclosure boundary is the thing worth looking for, its oval shape hinting at the larger sacred landscape that once organised this corner of Limerick.