It is, in fact, something older and stranger: a place called the Killeen, from the Irish cillín meaning little church, a name that carries within it the memory of an ecclesiastical site so thoroughly abandoned that by the early twentieth century there were no headstones, no visible graves, and almost nothing left of the building itself. A single aged ash tree, some fifteen feet in circumference at its base when recorded, marks where the west gable once stood.

Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan described the enclosure as roughly forty-five paces across and bounded by a low earthen rampart about two feet high. Within it, towards the southern side, the church had stood, a modest rectangular structure approximately eight and a half metres long and six metres wide. A mound of stone rubble in the south-western quadrant, partly obscured by tree cover, is thought to represent what remains of the building, though field clearance over the generations has likely added to the pile. The enclosure itself served as a burial ground for adults until around 1770, after which it fell out of use entirely. The local tradition, as Carrigan recorded it, held that the church had once been a parish church, but that it was given up many centuries before his time, with the parish functions transferred to a new church built at Aharney. That transfer left the Killeen to slowly dissolve back into the landscape, its congregation dispersed, its stones scattered or absorbed into field walls, its dead unmarked.