What tends to receive less attention is the wider context in which it sits: a large stone-walled enclosure, roughly 36 metres by 44 metres internally, whose western half has largely disappeared from view. The oratory occupies only the south-eastern corner of this enclosure, separated from the rest by an internal dividing wall. That corner sits slightly raised above the remainder of the interior and contains, alongside the oratory itself, a leacht and a carved cross-slab, the leacht being a low rectangular cairn-like mound of stones, including quartz, that in early Irish ecclesiastical sites is generally associated with commemoration or pilgrimage ritual.

The oratory is, by any measure, a remarkable piece of construction. It is the only perfectly intact example of its corbelled, boat-shaped type surviving in Ireland, built entirely of sandstone rubble with external facing stones bevelled to shed water. The walls, between one and 1.2 metres thick, rise to a pointed internal vault that closes with flat flags nearly four metres above floor level. The doorway in the west gable narrows slightly as it rises, a feature typical of early Irish stonework, and two squared perforations above the inner lintel once secured a wooden door frame. Three corbels projecting from the east gable wall, above a small round-headed window with carefully splayed ingoings, may have held a lamp or a book. Whether the lime mortar visible inside the building acted only as internal pointing or as a more structural element throughout the wall core remains unresolved. A small stone cross now placed by the OPW on the east gable ridge reflects an original arrangement, since a socket stone in that position confirms the oratory once carried its own gable ornament.

Directly to the south-west of the oratory stands the cross-slab, a stone 1.1 metres high bearing an equal-armed cross within a circle on its west face and a faint inscription in half-uncial script, the rounded letterforms associated with early medieval insular manuscripts. R. A. S. Macalister, reading the inscription in 1949, proposed the text COLUM MAC DINET, though only the first word remains legible with confidence and the remaining letters are now so worn that even individual characters are uncertain. The enclosing wall itself, averaging about 1.3 metres in both height and thickness, has been continuously maintained as a field boundary and also marks the townland boundary between Gallarus and Ballynana, which means that centuries of ordinary agricultural use have overlaid and partially obscured what was once a coherent ecclesiastical landscape.