When Colonel Acton set about levelling the ancient earthwork on which the site sits, the volume of human remains he uncovered was enough to make him abandon the work entirely. The site survives, at least in part, because of that moment of apparent reluctance.

The place is known as Kilboy, from the Irish Cill-buidhe, meaning "yellow church". Writing in 1928, Ronan recorded that the church stood on an ancient rath, a circular earthen enclosure of the kind used in early medieval Ireland both as a defensive boundary and as a marker of status or sacred space, measuring 28 yards in diameter. Kilboy was probably, Ronan suggested, the church of Balimacapeil, linking it to a wider ecclesiastical geography that has otherwise largely faded from the landscape. The site is now subject to a preservation order under the National Monuments Acts, which affords it a degree of formal protection that Colonel Acton's bones could not quite guarantee on their own.