The building itself was modest even in its prime, measuring roughly nine metres long and four and a half metres wide, and by 1841 its walls were already described as destroyed nearly to their foundations. Aerial imagery taken between 2011 and 2013 still catches the outline of the structure from above, even when it is almost invisible at ground level.

The dedication of the church gives it a peculiar reach beyond County Kerry. It was consecrated to Saint Cuan Airbre, identified in John O'Donovan's 1841 account as the second Abbot of Mothel, a monastery located in the Déise, the old Gaelic territory around what is now Carrick-on-Suir in County Waterford. That a small rural church in the barony of Corkaguiny, on the Dingle Peninsula, should be tied to a figure whose principal association lies in distant Munster is the kind of detail that hints at the broad networks of early Irish monasticism, where the influence of a founding saint could spread far beyond a single locality. The church fell within the diocese of Ardfert and the parish of Ballymacelligott, administrative boundaries that persisted long after the building itself had ceased to function. The name Kilquane, from the Irish Cill Chuáin, simply means the church of Cuan, preserving the dedication in the landscape long after the walls have gone.