By the time the Ordnance Survey cartographers arrived in 1838 to map the area, the building had already vanished so completely that they did not mark it on their six-inch maps at all. The graveyard itself was recorded, named 'Kilfian', but of the church it once contained, there was nothing left to draw.

The scholar John O'Donovan, working on the Ordnance Survey Letters in 1838, noted simply that the church 'has been demolished', which suggests the loss was relatively recent but already total. Yet the graveyard's name offers a quiet clue about what may once have stood here. 'Kilfian' follows the pattern of early Irish ecclesiastical place names, where 'cill', meaning a church or monastic cell, is combined with a personal name, often that of a founding saint. Alongside the placename, a cross-slab, a flat stone carved with a cross of the kind commonly associated with early Christian burial practice in Ireland, survives in the graveyard. Together, these two details raise the possibility that a church of early medieval date once occupied this ground, long before whatever later structure O'Donovan found already gone.