No headstone marks the spot, no boundary wall survives, and there is no visible trace at ground level of what was buried there. Yet the location was still being pointed out by local people in the nineteenth century, and when the field was ploughed at the start of that century, portions of coffins and human bones came up with the soil.

The site takes its name from St Braghan, an early Irish saint whose feast day falls on the 17th of September, as recorded in the Martyrology of Donegal, a seventeenth-century catalogue of Irish saints. Writing in 1883, Holahan noted that local tradition held a church had stood here too, though no physical evidence of it remained even then. By 1905, the historian Carrigan could be more precise about what had happened: the church at Kilbraghan cross had been thrown down and the graveyard destroyed when the public road was constructed, with the work carried out some years before his writing. Carrigan also recorded a tradition that a monastery had once occupied the site. The place name itself, Kilbraghan, follows a common Irish pattern in which "kil" derives from the Irish "cill", meaning a church or monastic cell, suggesting the settlement's ecclesiastical origins reach back a very long way. One further detail hints at what may lie beneath the landscape: the curve of the road towards Graigue may trace the northern arc of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular boundary that typically surrounded early medieval Irish religious sites. If so, the road did not so much destroy the old order as quietly absorb its outline.