The wall itself is substantial enough, standing 2.4 metres high, running just over five metres in length, and nearly a metre thick, with a slight batter, meaning an intentional inward lean, at its north-east corner, and one rectangular window opening still visible. It sits against the north gable of a dwelling house, the two structures pressed together on the slope, as if one has been propping up the other for some time.

By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map of the area, the cluster of buildings here was already being recorded as a group of houses in ruins. That the site carried the designation of a school at all points to a broader pattern across rural Ireland in the decades before and around that period, when informal or hedge schools, often held in simple structures or even outdoors, served communities far from any established educational institution. Whether this building functioned as a formal schoolhouse or something more makeshift is not possible to say with certainty from what survives. What is clear is that by the time the surveyors came through, the place had already been abandoned long enough to look like rubble.

The setting gives the remains a particular quality. Positioned on the hillside with Dunmanus Bay to the east, the surviving wall occupies a spot that would have been exposed and working rather than scenic in any deliberate sense. The view would have simply been part of daily life for whoever once used this place.