Beneath the grass, at the heart of the rectangular plot, lies the site of the ancient parish church of Cannaway. No masonry breaks the surface. The church was already described as ruinous by 1639, and by 1700 only half its walls were standing. The ground has since swallowed the rest entirely, leaving a working burial ground built around an invisible ruin.

The graveyard itself measures roughly 60 metres along its south-west to north-east axis and about 25 metres across, enclosed by a drystone wall. The earliest inscribed headstone dates to 1765, though a cluster of low, uninscribed stones towards the eastern end is likely older. In the north-west corner, a Church of Ireland parish church was built in 1814; the writer Samuel Lewis, visiting not long after, described it as a plain building with a lofty square tower. It was in ruins by 1900 and demolished during the 1930s, and now only a small pile of rubble marks where it stood. Just outside the northern wall, a building recorded on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map is thought, from surviving descriptions, to have been a house associated with the Long family, who held a hereditary ecclesiastical role at this site for much of the medieval period. No trace of it remains above ground. The layering of erasure at Bawnatemple is almost systematic: church after church, building after building, reduced to rumour and rubble. One tangible exception is a stone found in a nearby field during the 1970s, inscribed with a Maltese cross dateable to the 7th century, suggesting the site's origins reach back to the earliest centuries of Christian settlement in Ireland.