No masonry rises above the soil, no ruin marks the spot; the site announces itself to nobody passing on the road.

Writing in 1908, the antiquarian Patrick Power noted the considerable difficulty he had encountered in even locating the church, which he recorded as "Mary's Church," suggesting the name Kilmurry, meaning roughly "Mary's church" in Irish, was at that point a relatively recent label for the townland rather than an ancient designation carried in continuous local memory. Power placed it in a small field on the farm of a man named Dahill, and recorded that the foundations had only come to light a few years earlier, turned up accidentally during farming operations. By the time the second edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced, between 1901 and 1905, the site was already marked as "Kilmurry Church (Site of)", though that cartographic acknowledgement may itself have drawn on Power's own tentative identification rather than independent evidence. The circularity of the record is quietly telling: a church known mainly because one scholar looked hard for it, mapped because he thought he had found it, and now resting entirely underground on ground that has continued to be farmed ever since.