The site is known as Templemanaghan, or Teampall Mhanacháin, also called Teampall Geal, and the accumulated stonework here ranges from early ogham script to simple incised crosses built directly into the oratory walls, as though the fabric of the building itself had been pressed into service as a devotional surface.

The oratory is a compact rectangular structure, measuring roughly 3.35 metres by 4.4 metres internally, built of split stone and rubble with walls up to 1.6 metres thick. It no longer has its corbelled roof, a construction technique in which overlapping horizontal stones are stepped inward to form a vault without mortar, and sections of the north and east walls have been substantially rebuilt. A stone finial, undecorated but closely comparable to one recorded at Church Island near Valentia, has been restored to the west gable. In front of the oratory stands an ogham stone, ogham being an early medieval script in which letters are represented by notches and lines cut along a stone's edge, traditionally held to mark the grave of St Manchan. The inscription on its north-east angle reads QENILOCI MAQI MAQI-AINIA MUC, and both faces carry incised crosses. A second inscription in half-uncial script, noted by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1945, is now entirely untraceable. Surrounding the oratory, a series of cross-slabs in various states of completeness carry equal-armed crosses, crosses within circles, and in one case an unusual quatrefoil motif at the base of the stem. One slab that Macalister recorded in 1949 as lying on the window sill has since disappeared entirely. Beneath the site, a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage or chamber of the kind often associated with early ecclesiastical and secular settlements, known as Poulnasaggart or Poll na Sagart, runs beneath a subcircular mound at the western edge of the enclosure; its chambers are now inaccessible. In 1848, the antiquarian Windele described a great oval earthen rampart to the east of the oratory, and the Ordnance Survey Name Books corroborate a circular embankment, but both sources were already describing something in the past tense; by 1875, when the Earl of Dunraven visited, the embankment had been removed, and he was told locally that several small buildings had been cleared from the site within living memory. Children were still being buried here in the nineteenth century, and an Easter Sunday turas, a traditional penitential circuit, once linked the oratory, the souterrain, and a holy well some 150 metres to the south.