The modern rectangular burial ground at Kiltivna sits inside the ghostly outline of a much earlier oval enclosure, and beneath the trimmed grass and tidy headstones lie the fragmentary remains of an early medieval church and the earthworks of a cashel, a type of roughly circular stone or earthen enclosure associated with early Christian ecclesiastical settlements in Ireland. The two histories, one still active, one largely erased, occupy the same south-facing slope without much acknowledgement of each other.

Neary, writing in 1914, recorded local tradition associating the site with St. Patrick, a connection that may reflect genuine early Christian activity here or simply the tendency to attach the most prominent name in Irish hagiography to any ancient sacred place. What can be said with more confidence is that the ruins of a rectangular east-west aligned church survive, if only just: fragmentary sections of the north side-wall and a portion of the east gable remain standing, giving a building that measured more than 7.7 metres in length and over 4.7 metres in width. No architectural details, such as doorways, windows, or carved stonework, are any longer visible. The cashel enclosure that once surrounded the church's eastern half measured roughly 45 metres east to west and 25 metres north to south, defined partly by a denuded earthen bank running from the south-west through north to south-east, and elsewhere by a simple scarp in the ground. The western sector of that enclosure has been cut across by the graveyard boundary wall, and the eastern half has been considerably disturbed by burials over the centuries. A separate enclosure lies about 100 metres to the north-north-east, suggesting this was once a more complex and active landscape than it appears today.