Yet that doorway is the detail that makes the site quietly arresting. It is trabeate, meaning the opening is spanned by a flat horizontal lintel rather than an arch, a form associated with early Irish ecclesiastical architecture. The dressed stonework of the doorway, carefully cut and finished, sits in obvious contrast to the undressed, roughly coursed rubble of the walls around it, suggesting either that the doorway was brought from elsewhere or that it once belonged to a rather more deliberate building programme than the rest of the structure implies.

The church sits in the south-east quadrant of a wider ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that typically marks an early medieval monastic or religious site in Ireland. According to Lavelle's 1994 survey, the building was originally small, measuring around 4.9 metres north to south and 5.8 metres east to west, but a chancel was added to the east end at some point, extending it to 10.4 metres in that direction. A chancel is the eastern section of a church, generally reserved for the clergy and the altar, and its addition here suggests the site remained in active religious use long enough to warrant expansion. The dedication is to St Kieran, and a holy well associated with the site lies to the east of the ruins.