What survives is a roughly 14.6 by 6.4 metre structure cut into the slope on its north-western side, with walls now reduced to little more than a course or two of stone above the exterior ground level. Most of the mortar has long since perished from the joints, and the interior, though levelled by the original cutting into the hillside, is uneven with sod-covered rubble from walls that have long since given way.

The identity of the place is genuinely contested. Nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey correspondence, recorded by Flanagan in 1930, described it as a supposed friary of which foundations remain, though the same OS maps of 1840 to 1841 labelled the spot simply as a holy well, a term that on Irish maps of that period often marks a site of older religious significance rather than a spring alone. Gwynn and Hadcock, writing in 1988, associated this location with a monastery called Cluain-conbruin, said to have been founded by St. Abban, placing it here in the landscape around Rathcoun. St. Abban is an early medieval figure connected to several foundations in Leinster and Munster, though the details of his life are tangled with hagiographical tradition. The difficulty is that a more recent study by Ó Cearbhaill, published in 2010, argues that the church of Cluain Conbhruin actually belongs at Derrycloney, a different townland altogether. The result is a site that may be the remains of an early monastic foundation, or may be something else entirely, its true dedication and origins still unresolved.