When surveyors examined the site in October 1984, they found almost nothing left: low, grass-covered foundation lines, nowhere higher than half a metre, tracing the outline of a rectangular building roughly fifteen and a half metres long and just under five metres wide. The walls, built from roughly dressed stone and gravelly mortar, had long since collapsed or been robbed out. No doorway surrounds, no window openings, no decorative stonework of any kind survived. There was not even evidence of a graveyard, which, for a building recorded as a church, is a conspicuous absence.

That absence has led to a compelling reassessment. Road development work in 1997 disturbed ground within less than two metres of the structure and produced no burials. Taking this alongside the lack of grave-markers, the scholar Elizabeth FitzPatrick proposed in 2019 that the building may have served a different purpose entirely, identifying it as a possible schoolhouse associated with the Ó hUiginn ollamh. An ollamh was the highest rank of learned poet in the Gaelic tradition, a figure of considerable status in medieval Irish society, and the Ó hUiginn family were among the most celebrated poetic dynasties of medieval Connacht. FitzPatrick further suggested that the actual medieval church for the townland may lie elsewhere, within Kilcloony graveyard roughly 650 metres to the south-east. Kilcloony Castle sits around 280 metres to the south, hinting at the broader medieval settlement that once organised itself across this quiet stretch of County Galway. The curving earthen bank around the base of the rise, meanwhile, appears to belong not to any early enclosure but to the landscaping of the later Quarrymount House to the north-north-east, a reminder of how thoroughly subsequent generations reshaped the land around sites they no longer recognised or remembered.