That particular kind of erasure, one building consuming another and then itself disappearing, leaves a site that is essentially a ghost of a ghost, with very little above ground to suggest the long history compressed into this small piece of land.

By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey officers were compiling their Letters, the original medieval parish church of Kilmacahill had already vanished. The surveyors recorded the situation plainly: no part of the old church remained, it having been pulled down to build what they called the modern little Protestant Church of Ireland building. That replacement church has since been demolished as well, as noted by O'Brien in 1955. What survives is the sub-rectangular graveyard itself, which sits in the western sector of a large bivallate ecclesiastical enclosure. Bivallate means bounded by two concentric earthen banks or ditches, and such enclosures are a recognised marker of early medieval monastery sites in Ireland, suggesting that organised religious activity here predates the Norman period considerably. The graveyard and its enclosure, then, are the most legible remnants of what was once a more substantial monastic foundation.