The building is modest by any measure, a rectangle of roughly 8.7 metres east to west and 4.45 metres north to south, and today only the lower courses of its walls remain standing. What draws attention is not its scale but its name and purpose. Locally it is called Teampull na Dithreabhaigh, meaning the church of the hermit, a title that implies a life of deliberate solitude once lived close by, though no record survives of who that solitary figure may have been.

The church sits within a cashel, a roughly circular stone enclosure of a kind common in early medieval Ireland, used to define and protect ecclesiastical or domestic settlements. Its position in the south-east quadrant of that enclosure is consistent with early monastic arrangements. The site was significant enough to appear on a sixteenth-century map of Beare, noted by O'Brien in 1970, which suggests it retained some identity in local memory well into the post-medieval period. The south wall retains a central doorway, 1.15 metres wide, and the interior is filled with low, uninscribed grave markers. These plain stones, without name or date, are the markers of a cillin, a type of informal burial ground used for unbaptised children and others who could not be interred in consecrated ground. O'Shea and Crowley recorded the site as a children's burial ground in 1972, and that association persists in local knowledge to this day.

The layering here is quietly remarkable: an early Christian hermit's church, absorbed into a cashel, later pressed into service as a place of last resort for the most marginal of burials, and all of it still visible at ground level in a corner of west Cork.