The ground gave up its secrets reluctantly, and what emerged was evidence of a church or chapel that had long since disappeared from the landscape, leaving behind little more than a field name and a fragment of castle wall to mark where it once stood.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, pieced together what local tradition still remembered. The ruined castle nearby, he recorded, was associated in local memory with friars, and it marked the position of a monastic grange, a term for an outlying farm or estate managed by a religious house. Close beside it had stood a church or chapel, and its graveyard came to light only when foundations were being cut for a Mr Whitecroft's house. That house is most likely Kilree House, built sometime between 1839 and 1847 and positioned about seventy metres south-west of the castle remains. The field adjoining the house and the old castle fragment carries the Irish name Gorhee na soggarth, meaning the Priest's Field, a name that quietly preserved the memory of religious occupation long after the physical structures had gone. The church and its associated graveyard are now thought to lie in the area immediately around, and at least partially underneath, the house itself, making Kilree House an unwitting occupant of a much older sacred site.