Where a church once stood, there are no visible remains, no tumbled masonry, no foundation lines breaking the surface. The site is marked, almost as an admission of absence, on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1903, labelled as a church, though even by that date there was nothing there to observe.

The place name itself carries what the stones no longer can. Kilmacabea derives from the Irish, and the "Kil" prefix, from "cill", denotes an early ecclesiastical site, typically a cell or small church associated with an early Christian founder or saint. The second element is thought to refer to a saint named Abea or Abba, though the precise history of this dedication has grown indistinct over time. What remains is the graveyard, which continued in use long after whatever structure had stood within it disappeared, as was common across rural Ireland where a burial ground could outlast its associated building by centuries. By the time the six-inch survey was being compiled at the turn of the twentieth century, the church had already left the landscape entirely, surviving only as a cartographic notation and a name.