The name has persisted even as the physical evidence has largely dissolved back into the ground, which is itself a kind of clue. Sites that survive primarily in local memory and in the contours of a field tend to be old, and this one is no exception.

The church stood in the northern half of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the type of roughly circular boundary that medieval Irish monasteries and church settlements were typically laid out within, often reusing even older sacred ground. Writing in 1934, a researcher named Bowman noted something curious: the church site appears to coincide with a ringfort, the circular earthwork farmsteads that dot the Irish countryside from the early medieval period. Whether the ecclesiastical community deliberately chose a pre-existing enclosure, or whether a later tradition conflated the two features over centuries of proximity, is not entirely clear. What the observation does suggest is that this small corner of County Cork has been marked out as significant, in one way or another, for a very long time.

Nothing survives above ground in any legible architectural form. The mounds Bowman described are the kind that accumulate slowly over collapsed walls and forgotten foundations, and they are easy to miss if you do not know what you are looking at. The persistence of the Irish name, An Cillín, is in some respects the most durable thing on the site.