The combination is quietly odd: a working government scientific facility sharing its grounds with a place of early Christian worship, ancient earthworks, and a holy well that someone, at some point, decided to fill in.

The church was dedicated to St. Caoimhghin, better known as St. Kevin of Glendalough, and the townland itself was recorded in earlier sources as Kylmekynyn, a name that gestures towards the saint's association with the place. The site sits in the parish of Castleknock, and by the time John Rocque mapped Dublin in 1760, the church was still legible enough to be marked beside a road running between Castleknock and Abbotstown. By the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the church appears at the centre of a smaller, rectangular graveyard, which is itself now understood to have been an earlier enclosure. The present graveyard is oval in shape, larger, and retains a stone-faced fosse, essentially a rock-lined ditch, running along the southern edge where the ground drops away sharply; it measures roughly 4.7 metres wide and 1.6 metres deep. The western and northern sides are enclosed instead by a wall, which appears to have been built over an earlier earthwork. Among the graves are memorials to Dublin city merchants: Daniel Darcy, commemorated in 1757; Maurice Ward in 1773; and Philip Reilly in 1774. To the south-east of the church lay a holy well dedicated to St. Coemhin, sometimes called Caveen Well, though it was closed up by the landlord, as noted by Ó Danachair in 1958.

Access to this site is complicated by the fact that it falls within the grounds of the State Laboratory, a functioning state facility, so a visit is not simply a matter of turning up. Anyone with a serious research or recording interest would do well to make enquiries in advance. The church ruins occupy the northern part of the oval enclosure on a slight elevation, which gives some sense of how the site was originally positioned to be visible across the surrounding landscape. The fosse along the southern perimeter is worth noting carefully; it is one of the more tangible indicators of just how many layers of use and enclosure are compressed into what, from a distance, might seem like an unremarkable patch of ground.