The townland itself, Kildarra, carries the memory of the building in its name: the Irish means Church of the Oak Tree. But the structure that inspired that name left no standing walls, no doorway, no carved stonework. What survives, if it survives at all, is a low mound of grass-covered earth running roughly east to west across the north-western corner of the graveyard.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled as part of the great nineteenth-century mapping project that sought to record placename origins across Ireland, noted that the townland name was derived from an old church, a small portion of which, it was said, remained in a churchyard. That cautious phrasing, "it is said", suggests the church was already more legend than landmark by the time the surveyors came through. Today, the most likely candidate for that remnant is a linear bank measuring seventeen metres long, roughly 1.3 metres wide, and no more than half a metre high, sitting adjacent to the northern enclosing wall. Stones protrude here and there through the sod, hinting at a buried wall beneath, but whether this represents the footprint of the church itself, the line of an earlier graveyard boundary, or something else entirely, remains an open question.

There is something fitting about a place whose existence is carried almost entirely by language. The oak tree that may have given this church its name is long gone. The church that gave the townland its name is, at best, a slight thickening of the ground. What remains is the word itself, Kildarra, quietly preserving the outline of something that even the Victorian mapmakers could not quite locate.