The medieval church that once stood at the centre of the site has long since disappeared, leaving a rectangular burial ground, roughly 33 metres north to south and 49 metres east to west, enclosed by a stone wall built sometime after 1700. An entrance gate sits in the middle of the western wall, as was common in ecclesiastical enclosures across Ireland, and the whole graveyard occupies the southern quadrant of a much larger, oval-shaped enclosure, the kind of form that typically signals an early medieval monastic or church site of some significance.

The place name itself carries the deeper history. The Ordnance Survey letters, those remarkable nineteenth-century field notes compiled as surveyors moved across Ireland documenting local knowledge and Irish-language placenames, recorded that the parish name derives from the Irish 'Cill Fhionachta', meaning the cell or church of Fionachta, also rendered as Fionshneachta, a figure believed to have been a saint. A 'cill', in this context, refers to an early ecclesiastical cell or small church, often associated with a founding holy person whose name became attached to the settlement around it. The saint Fionachta is not elaborated upon further in the surviving notes, which is itself a common situation with figures from the early Irish church, known only through the placenames they left behind.

The site sits within a large oval enclosure, a shape that specialists in early medieval archaeology recognise as characteristic of important church foundations from the early Christian period in Ireland. Oval or curvilinear enclosures of this kind often predate the more angular, post-Norman layout of church and graveyard, and finding one largely intact in the landscape is relatively uncommon. The post-1700 stone wall around the inner graveyard is the most visible feature for a visitor approaching today. The western entrance gate provides the natural way in, and once inside, the approximate footprint of the vanished church at the centre of the space is worth looking for, even if nothing structural remains above ground.