By 1990, a field inspection found no visible surface indication that anything was there at all, no stones, no mounds, no trace of enclosure. The ground had simply swallowed it.

The site owes its historical identity to the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable series of nineteenth-century field notebooks in which surveyors recorded local traditions and physical observations as they mapped Ireland. The entry compiled by O'Flanagan notes that local people, described as "the peasantry", insisted the ground had once held an old church and served as the private burial place of the family and dependants of Mac Dermot's castle. Castles of this period often maintained a closely associated burial ground for household members and those who lived under the lord's protection, separate from a parish churchyard. The account adds that the site "certainly does exhibit the remains of broken old graves internally", which suggests that at the time of the survey there was still something to observe, fragments of grave markers or disturbed earth that local memory could attach a story to. By the time of the 1990 inspection, even that had gone.