The doorway, with its chamfered jambs and flat lintel, the jambs being cut at an angle to soften the transition from wall to opening, sits noticeably off-centre, as though the original builders made a deliberate choice to place it slightly to one side rather than bisect the gable evenly. Whether this was a functional decision, a liturgical one, or simply a quirk of construction is not recorded. The church itself is modest in scale, measuring just over ten metres in length and five and a half metres wide, oriented east to west in the standard medieval arrangement. At the opposite end from the doorway, a tall round-headed window pierces the east wall, the kind of opening more commonly associated with Romanesque influence, admitting light towards the altar end where it would have mattered most.

The site sits in a sheltered position to the south of Ballynakill Lough, and the ruins are surrounded by a graveyard that continued in use well beyond the church's active life, with the majority of burials dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This pattern of a community maintaining a graveyard around a much older ruin is common across the west of Ireland, where the sanctity of a site could outlast its buildings by several hundred years. Gwynn and Hadcock's 1970 survey of medieval religious houses in Ireland, and an earlier account by Killanin from 1947, both reference the abbey, placing it within the broader record of ecclesiastical remains in County Galway, though the precise origins and religious affiliation of this particular foundation are not detailed in what survives.