What remains is enough to read the building's original shape: a nave measuring roughly 15.5 metres by 6 metres, a choir at the eastern end, and the ghost of a square tower that once divided the two. The tower has vanished, but the semi-circular arches that supported it, each around 4 metres high and 2 metres wide, give a sense of the modest ambition of the structure. On the north wall, worn steps once led up to that tower, and the outline of a possible doorway can still be made out, though both features are now heavily disfigured by time.

The abbey was built from thin local flagstones, a material that gave the masonry what the antiquarian Cochrane described in 1913 as a peculiar appearance, quite different from the cut limestone that defines so many Irish ecclesiastical ruins. The walls, just over a metre thick, were set with lime-and-sand cement. It is thought to have been a monastery associated with the O'Connor Kerry clan, a Gaelic dynasty with deep roots in north Kerry, and its position within an early ecclesiastical enclosure suggests the site had sacred significance well before the abbey itself was built. No written records confirm its founding or the details of its use, though the physical evidence points to an extended period of occupation before it fell into ruin. John O'Donovan, writing in 1841, noted that locals digging on the site in search of buried money had turned up human bones and skulls, an unsurprising discovery given that burial grounds commonly developed around monastic foundations, even where no surface trace of graves now survives.