A cairn is a mound of stones, typically raised over a burial or used as a landmark, and here one has been carved into a roughly circular enclosure, its edge shaped at some point into a bank about five metres wide. Whoever built the church, or adapted the cairn for its new purpose, was making deliberate use of something far older, layering one kind of sacred geography onto another.

The building's foundations measure roughly 10.5 metres east to west and 7 metres north to south, and some of the granite blocks survive, though roughly dressed rather than finely worked. Cut stone that may have come from a door or window frame is reputed to have been taken from the site at some point, which is not unusual for remote ruins where dressed stone was a practical resource. The site was already recognised as a church by the time the Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1838, where it is named as such on the six-inch map. At the western side of the cairn, excavated into the mound itself, is a well called St Gad's Well. Holy wells in Ireland are typically associated with a named saint and often served as sites of localised devotion, sometimes long after any formal religious community had disappeared. St Gad is not a widely known figure in the Irish hagiographical record, which gives the dedication a quietly obscure quality.

The summit setting means the approach involves a hill walk, and the cairn enclosure itself is what frames the ruins rather than any standing walls. The well, cut into the western edge of the cairn, is worth looking for separately from the church foundations, as the two elements together give a clearer sense of how the site functioned as a whole.