The walls are drystone and uncoursed, meaning the stones were laid without mortar and without the careful horizontal rows that give a structure its strength and longevity. At their tallest they reach just over a metre; in places they have slumped to barely thirty centimetres. There are no windows, no hearth, no chimney. A narrow entrance, less than a metre wide, opens from the southeast wall, and inside, a collapsed partition once divided the space into two unequal rooms, the larger measuring around four metres and the smaller about two and a half, connected through a gap in the dividing wall not much wider than a person turned sideways.

Locally, the building has long been associated with the abbey that gives the townland its name, an Augustinian Canons foundation whose remains lie roughly 750 metres to the southwest. The Augustinian Canons were communities of clergy who followed the Rule of St Augustine and, from the medieval period onwards, established houses across Ireland, often acquiring substantial landholdings in the process. The connection to that foundation is plausible enough in terms of geography, since this building does sit on what were abbey lands. But its construction tells a different story. The form and the rudimentary technique point firmly to a nineteenth-century date, placing it well outside the medieval period and suggesting it was a purely functional structure, perhaps a store, a shelter, or a small agricultural outbuilding, raised by someone who needed walls more than windows. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map produced in 1837, which complicates rather than clarifies the picture, hinting it may have been built after that survey or was simply too modest to record.