Only the lowest courses survive, the interior faced with large upright slabs set on edge, and a gap roughly 1.2 metres wide at the western side marks where an entrance once stood. The Skelligs are visible from here on a clear day, out beyond St Finan's Bay, which gives some sense of the exposed, contemplative character of the place.

The site belongs to the early Christian enclosure of Cill Buaine, and its dedication carries a remarkable local tradition: St Buonia, also recorded as Beoanigh, is reputed in the area to have been a sister of St Patrick. A competing account, cited by O'Donoghue writing in 1893, attributes the foundation instead to St Brendan, or to Beoanus, a disciple of his. These overlapping claims are not unusual for early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where the prestige of a founding saint was both spiritually and politically significant, and where origin traditions accumulated over centuries. Accounts published by Lynch in 1902 and Henry in 1957 remain among the principal sources for the site, since access for formal survey was at some point refused, leaving the archaeological record more partial than it might otherwise be. The rectangular building sits close to a circular hut on the same terrace, a pairing that reflects the mixed architectural traditions of early Irish monastic settlements, where rounded and rectilinear structures often coexisted within a single enclosure.