The ruins of Kilnarovanagh church appear in 1940s records as lying within a rath on Buckley's land, but when the site was examined, no trace of a church could be found there at all. A rath, sometimes called a ring fort, is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure used in early medieval Ireland, typically as a farmstead. The rath itself survives and appears on the 1895 Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the name Lisnarovanagh, but whatever ecclesiastical remains were once associated with it, if any, had either been removed or were never quite where people remembered them to be.

A second 1940s account complicates things further. This version places the church not inside the rath but on the same Buckley landholding, somewhere opposite Faha School in the townland of Knocknagowna, roughly 1.25 kilometres to the south. Here the fate of the building is at least explained, if not mourned: it was demolished and its stones carried off for use in later churches. That kind of material recycling was common across rural Ireland, where dressed stone was too valuable to leave idle, and it means the building may survive in scattered form within the walls of other structures, wholly unrecognised. What it leaves behind at Kilnarovanagh is an absence that the historical record can describe but not quite locate.