The foundations are all that remain of a building constructed from drystone coursing and upright slabs set on end, measuring roughly 7.3 metres by 5.2 metres internally, with possible entrance gaps in both the east and west walls. What makes the place quietly arresting is not the stonework itself but the view it commands westward across St Finan's Bay toward the Skelligs, those jagged Atlantic pinnacles that drew early Christian monks to one of the most austere outposts of the medieval world.

The site belongs to an early ecclesiastical settlement known as Cill Buaine, a cill being the Irish term for a small church or cell, often marking some of the earliest Christian foundations in the country. It is associated with St Buonia, also known as Beoanigh, who is locally reputed to have been a sister of St Patrick. The attribution is, as with many such traditions, difficult to verify, and competing accounts recorded by O'Donoghue in 1893 propose instead that the site was founded by St Brendan of Clonfert, or by St Beoanus, identified as his disciple. St Brendan himself was a Kerry man with deep connections to this coastline, and the Iveragh peninsula is scattered with early monastic remains that reflect the intense religious activity of the fifth and sixth centuries. Whether the founding figure was Buonia, Brendan, or Beoanus, the placement of a religious enclosure here, high above the valley with the Skelligs visible on the horizon, carries its own quiet logic.