There are no headstones, no enclosing wall, and no visible break in the ground to indicate that the dead lie beneath. The site shows up on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 as a D-shaped area, roughly 34 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west, marked only by a dashed line extending westward from a field boundary. That dashed line was itself a signal: the surveyors used it to indicate that the area had no enclosure at all.

When the Ordnance Survey officers passed through in 1839 and asked local people about the place, they were told it contained a fragment of a ruined church wall and a separate area to the north used for burying stillborn infants. The locals knew it as Teampall Chlasi Shuibhlain, which was then translated as meaning the Church of Shulawn's Trench. That translation was later disputed by the historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, who argued the name was simply Teampall Killashoolan, the Church of Killashoolan, and carried no reference to a trench at all. What both accounts agree on is that the local people of 1839 knew nothing further about its origins. Carrigan added that the churchyard contained no inscribed monuments of any kind, that adult burials had ceased around 1830, and that the ground was still being used for the burial of unbaptised children. In Irish tradition, unbaptised infants, who were excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic practice, were interred in liminal spaces of this kind, often referred to as cillíní or, as O'Kelly noted in 1969, by the term reilig na mígárlach.

The site leaves almost nothing for a visitor to read or observe. The graveyard is not visible at ground level, the church it once accompanied has left only a fragment of wall, and no inscriptions survive. What remains is essentially a location, and a name that scholars have disagreed about for well over a century.