The bones are still there, as far as anyone knows, and so are the stone foundations of the church that was built over them. The site vanished from view not through neglect or the slow work of centuries, but through the particular urgency of 1960s suburban expansion, when a housing scheme prompted a race against the bulldozers.

The story had been half-legible for a long time before anyone dug. A map of the Estate of James Marinus Kennedy, drawn in 1761, labels the relevant field the "Chappie Field"; a second map, undated but no later than 1785, calls it "Chapel Hill". As late as 1944, the local historian Liam Ua Broin noted that the field was still known as the "Chapel Field" and contained a mound with a little outcropping masonry, which people traditionally associated with a church, though Ua Broin allowed that it might equally be the remains of a rath, a type of early medieval ringfort. When Dublin County Council identified an earthen banked enclosure during survey work in 1962, the nature of the site remained uncertain enough that it took an emergency to resolve it. In January 1964, rescue excavations led by Etienne Rynne of the National Museum of Ireland exposed the foundations of a stone nave-and-chancel church set within a roughly oval ecclesiastical enclosure measuring approximately 48 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, defined by a low earthen bank. What emerged alongside the foundations was more unsettling: large quantities of human bones, mostly in complete disorder, scattered across the site with very little sign of intact burials. Bones were found within the church foundations themselves, and in the stones of the south-western corner of the altar, many of them belonging to children. Rynne concluded that the ground had been used heavily for burial before the stone church was ever raised, pointing to a possible earlier wooden church within the enclosure, perhaps from as far back as the eleventh century, when a bronze ring-pin was lost on the site. The stone church itself was probably built in the early medieval period, and had been destroyed before the end of the eighteenth century.

There is nothing to see at Watery Lane today. The housing estate that covers the site shows no surface trace of the excavated church or graveyard, and there is no marker or signage to indicate what lies below. The site is of interest less as a place to visit than as a case study in how quickly an archaeological landscape can be absorbed into the ordinary fabric of a suburb, leaving only the historical record, and in this instance Rynne's 1967 published report, to account for what was there.