What little masonry remains visible on the south wall is well-squared and carefully cut, hinting at a building that was once properly constructed and maintained. A narrow possible doorway, just 0.67 metres wide and still retaining its sillstone, sits at the centre of that same wall, a detail small enough to overlook but oddly specific enough to suggest a real threshold, a place people once passed through with some purpose.

The site sits at the northern end of a graveyard, with a possible holy well lying roughly sixty metres further north. Local tradition holds that during the Penal Laws, when Catholic worship was suppressed across Ireland and priests risked arrest or worse, mass was celebrated here, making use of the ruin's obscurity rather than despite it. An early nineteenth-century topographical account referred to the remains as those of an old abbey, and the name Kilmagoura itself carries the element "kil", from the Irish "cill", meaning a church or monastic cell. Despite that suggestive combination of name and description, the site has not been identified as a confirmed monastic foundation by scholars who have systematically catalogued such places across Ireland. Whether it was ever more than a parish church is uncertain, and the ground has not yet offered a clear answer.