The name itself is telling: Shankill derives from the Irish Sean Cill, meaning old church, a placename that recurs across Ireland wherever early ecclesiastical sites have been forgotten or absorbed into the landscape. The ground remembers, even when the records do not.

An adjacent field in Ash Big is reputed to be the site of a church, though its precise location has never been established. The two details together, the unearthed bones and the nearby tradition of a church, suggest the kind of early medieval religious settlement that once dotted this part of Louth, a county with a particularly dense concentration of early Christian remains. Without excavation or documentary evidence, however, the site remains in a frustrating category: known, named, and yet effectively lost.