But the modest enclosure at Kilva in County Cork marks the footprint of a medieval church, and almost nothing of the building itself survives above ground. What does remain, lying near the southern end of the enclosure, is a door jamb and a fragment of a late medieval pointed arch, the kind of arched doorway that would once have framed the entrance to a small stone church. The arch is simply there in the grass, disarticulated from any standing wall.

The site measures roughly eleven metres east to west and just under ten metres north to south, dimensions consistent with the small rectangular church that appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842. By that point the building was already reduced; today there is no visible trace of it beyond the enclosing wall and those fallen architectural fragments. The place-name itself offers a faint clue to the site's origins. Patrick Power, writing in 1940, interpreted Kilva as deriving from Cill Bheadh, where cill is the Irish word for a church or monastic cell, and Bheadh appears to be a personal name. Power noted that this church-founder is otherwise entirely unknown, which places Kilva in a long tradition of early Irish ecclesiastical sites associated with figures who left no record beyond the name of the place they once hallowed.