That gentle deflection is, in fact, one of the only legible signs that an ecclesiastical enclosure of roughly ninety metres in diameter once occupied this south-facing pasture at Ballynabortagh. The enclosure itself has been levelled, the church is gone, the burial ground has vanished into the grass, and what remains is a faint arc of low undulations in the turf and the quiet accommodation that field boundaries and roads make, almost unconsciously, around old sacred ground.

When the antiquarian John Windele visited in 1844, the place still held enough to read. He found an unbaptised burial ground, a feature known in Irish tradition as a cillín, where infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were interred, and a square compartment enclosing a cairn or mound that marked the site of the ancient church. Writing in 1914, O'Donoghue noted that the chapel had been in use as recently as three generations before Windele's visit, which would place active worship there somewhere into the eighteenth century. The site had already appeared on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured circular enclosure, a conventional cartographic marking for an earthwork of this kind, suggesting the surveyors recognised its outline even as it was disappearing. To the south-east, a bullaun stone survives; a bullaun is a boulder or outcrop bearing one or more artificial cup-shaped hollows, and such stones are commonly associated with early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, sometimes connected to ritual use of water collected in the depression.