The church is called Ballynakill, after the parish, but the site has long been known as Aghyart, and the graveyard surrounding it is marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps under that popular name, as Aghyart Burial Ground. This kind of slippage between administrative and vernacular naming is not uncommon in rural Ireland, but it does mean that the place carries a kind of doubled identity, the ecclesiastical record pointing one way, local memory another.

By the time the Ordnance Survey letters were compiled in the nineteenth century, the church was already well into its decline. The surveyors noted that the greater part of its two sidewalls remained standing but that both gables had been entirely demolished, with no doorway or window visible in what was left. Strikingly, the first edition of the six-inch OS map shows the building as a roofed rectangular structure, aligned roughly east-north-east to west-south-west, which places its collapse sometime after that survey was made. Today, nothing so legible remains. What survives is an L-shaped grassy bank, measuring approximately 9.5 metres north to south and 6.8 metres east to west, in the south-eastern portion of the modern graveyard. This low mound, easy to mistake for a natural feature, is thought to represent the last physical trace of the medieval building. The bank sits within a circular enclosure roughly 36 metres in diameter, defined by earth and stone, which is the kind of feature commonly associated with early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, where a raised or embanked ring demarcated the sacred space of a church and its burial ground. That enclosure survives best from the south-west through north to north-east; elsewhere a modern wall has been built directly over it, and in other sections it has vanished entirely. Among the more legible features of the site are a collection of eighteenth and nineteenth-century headstones, which Claffey documented in 1983 and which give the graveyard a more readable layer of history than the eroded medieval remains beneath them can now offer.