The site is described as very overgrown and almost impenetrable, occupying a slight terrace on a south-facing hillside, and local knowledge identifies it as an old church site even where the physical evidence has long since been swallowed by growth.

The place carries two related but subtly different names across time, which is itself a clue to how old the oral tradition around it must be. A 1915 account by Grattan recorded a local cemetery in what he spelled Tombrian, known at that time as Aughteduff. By the time the site was revisited more recently, the name had shifted in spoken usage to Augherteeduck, a phonetic drift that suggests a long chain of local transmission rather than any written record keeping the name stable. That kind of gradual sound-change in a placename is often a sign that a site has stayed lodged in community memory without ever attracting much official attention, passed along in conversation rather than on maps or in parish registers.