Its Irish name, Fothrach an tSainsiléara, translates as the Chancellor's House, and the identification is plausible: records from between 1302 and 1306 show that the Chancellor of the diocese of Ardfert held the rectory of Kilmalkedar as his prebend, meaning it formed part of the income attached to his office, and he may well have maintained a residence here. That a senior medieval churchman occupied a building this far out on the Dingle Peninsula, sheltered beneath the spurs of Reenconnell hill and overlooking Smerwick Harbour, gives the ruin a quiet administrative gravity that most visitors to Kilmalkedar probably walk straight past.

The building, 17.6 metres in length internally, is divided by a cross-wall into two unequal chambers, with the western floor set lower than the eastern. Its walls are raised on boulder foundations and built of split stone and rubble bonded in clay, and the fabric bears the marks of repeated alteration and repair. The eastern gable survives to about 2.1 metres and carries an internal offset at 1.8 metres, a feature mirrored on the western gable; this detail has been read as evidence that the building once had a loft storey. The western chamber retains a lintelled fireplace, partly refurbished in a later phase, two voussoirs from the original wider arch still visible in the chimney breast. Adjacent to the fireplace, a low opening leads to a stone-built oven projecting beyond the north wall, domed internally, 1.7 metres in diameter, its stonework spalled from repeated firing. The doorway connecting the two chambers has been narrowed over time until it amounts to little more than a crawl-through, and the internal dividing wall shows so many phases of patching and rebuilding that the sequence of changes resists easy interpretation. There are wall cupboards at several points, one of them of an unusual domed form spanning a corner angle, and a window opening in the south wall of the eastern chamber was designed to be shuttered, its lintelled head pierced for the purpose.