The western boundary of Kilbride graveyard is lined by a narrow rectangular structure, aligned north to south and annotated simply as 'Convent' on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map. When a surveyor named Oliver Davies visited in 1942, he was unconvinced: the walls, he wrote, rose no higher than about 1.5 metres and had no distinguishing features, suggesting to him a series of grave enclosures rather than anything monastic. The fragments of a parish church known locally as St. Bridget's Abbey form the northern boundary of the same graveyard, and the low wall footings of a second medieval church survive in the graveyard's centre. What survives, in other words, is a cluster of ambiguous masonry that raises more questions than it answers.

The tradition attached to this place is considerably more confident than the archaeology. Writing in 1867, a historian named Cogan recorded local belief that a church and convent were founded here by St. Brigid herself, and that this was the first church she established after her religious profession, near the hill of Uisneach, a site of considerable mythological and ceremonial significance in early Irish tradition. The ruins of two ecclesiastical buildings were already noted as early as the 1654 to 1657 Down Survey, a large-scale mapping project carried out under Cromwellian administration, which recorded 'the Ruines of two Churches' in the townland. By the nineteenth century, much of the standing stone had been carted away. Cogan described the sequence with a certain providential satisfaction: the stones of the old convent and church were taken, with the permission of the churchwarden, to build a house roughly a kilometre to the south, and that house was subsequently converted into Saint Brigid's Convent, Kilcoursey, occupied by the Sisters of Mercy. A Holmes family burial enclosure, dating to after 1700, was later built into the southern end of the possible convent structure, adding yet another layer to an already complicated site.