It is a small, telling detail: a fragment of deliberate craftsmanship repurposed by whoever was to hand, in a graveyard that has clearly been in continuous, layered use for a very long time. The church itself sits within a Kilpatrick graveyard that is in turn enclosed within a larger Early Christian ecclesiastical enclosure, suggesting human activity on this ground that stretches back well before any medieval stonework.

By 1655, when the Down Survey mapped Farbill Barony, the building was already depicted as a ruin. That survey, one of the earliest systematic mappings of Irish land ownership, shows a rectangular structure with a residential tower at the western end, annotated as 'Kill PC', meaning Kill Patrick Church, standing on lands then belonging to Nicholas Darcy and Sir John Nugent. A terrier accompanying the map noted the presence of ash trees around the chapel and, close by, a well called Killpatrick Well, described as being in great repute among the Irish inhabitants. The well and the church share a dedication to St. Patrick, and local folklore, recorded in the Schools' Collection, adds another layer: the area was also known as Scarden, or Scártán, a name the nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan identified in his Letters as marking a small brake, or thicket, where St. Patrick paused on his journey to Clonard. Whether that tradition preserves a genuine early medieval memory or was shaped by the place-name itself is impossible to say, but the convergence of a Patrician well, a Patrician church, and a Patrician stopping-point in such a small area is striking.

When the ruins were examined in 1976, what remained was a nave and chancel church roughly twenty metres long and only four and a half metres wide, unusually narrow even by the modest standards of rural medieval Irish churches. The east gable survives best, with a broken window opening still legible at its centre. The foundations of the other walls are sod-covered and low, and burials within the interior have created considerable mounding across the floor. The church is invisible from aerial photography, entirely screened by the trees growing within the graveyard, which means that arriving on foot is the only way to read what remains.