Plough the land and large stones emerge, the buried remnants of what researchers have long described as a chapel site, an early ecclesiastical presence that now exists almost entirely beneath the surface, invisible to anyone simply walking past.

The site was noted by Healy in 1975, who recorded it as a chapel site in this coastal demesne setting. What little was documented then remained the sum of local knowledge for some time. The picture shifted somewhat when a geophysical survey was undertaken ahead of the Donabate-Rogerstown Waste Water Treatment Scheme, operating under Licence no. 08R0029. Geophysical survey uses instruments to detect buried features without excavation, reading variations in soil composition, magnetism, or electrical resistance to map what lies underground. That survey identified a possible platform approximately 70 metres north of the present known site, and this platform has been put forward as a candidate for the original chapel location, suggesting the ecclesiastical footprint here may be somewhat larger, or differently positioned, than the surface evidence alone would suggest.

Portraine sits on a peninsula between the Rogerstown and Broadmeadow estuaries north of Dublin, and the cliff-edge setting of the site gives it a particular quality, the land simply stops, and whatever community once gathered here did so at the edge of things. There is no formal access or visitor infrastructure at this location, and the site itself offers little to the eye in anything other than freshly ploughed conditions. Those with an interest in early ecclesiastical landscapes may find it worth factoring into a broader visit to the Donabate and Portraine area, where the layered land use of the demesne still shapes the local geography. The site is recorded in the archaeological record and its significance lies less in what can be seen than in what the ground has quietly held onto.