In 1820, the upper portion of a granite high cross was taken from this site and relocated to the churchyard at Graiguenamanagh, where it remains today. High crosses of this kind, typically carved with scriptural scenes or interlace ornament, were central features of early Irish monasteries, and the fact that only the upper portion survives suggests the rest was already lost or broken by the time anyone thought to preserve what remained.

The site's deeper history is anchored in hagiographical record. The Martyrology of Donegal, a seventeenth-century compilation of Irish saints' feast days drawing on much older sources, names a figure called Bairfionn, son of Aedh, and associates him with a place called Achadh-Cailltean, meaning something close to "field of the wood," situated in the Uí Drona territory, west of the River Barrow, in Uí Reithe, to the south of Leighlinbridge. That description corresponds to this part of Kilkenny, and it places the origins of religious activity here within the broader landscape of early Christian Ireland, when small monastic communities formed around the cult of a local saint. The townland name Aughkiletaun preserves, in anglicised form, something of that original Irish place name.

The site now lies in farmland, and the ruins are modest. What makes the place worth knowing about is less what survives on the ground than what was taken from it, and what the documentary record quietly preserves about the people who once considered it significant enough to name.