What remains is essentially a stone outline: walls of uncoursed rubble limestone measuring roughly 4.6 metres north to south and 17.4 metres east to west, with a destroyed doorway near the centre of the north wall the only feature that hints at how people once moved through the building. Uncoursed rubble construction, in which stones are laid without being dressed or arranged into regular horizontal rows, was common in rural ecclesiastical buildings throughout the west of Ireland, and here it gives the chapel a rough, almost provisional quality, as though it grew from the karst landscape around it rather than being built upon it.

Beyond its dimensions and materials, the chapel at Cahernichole is notably spare. No carved stonework, no surviving windows, no inscriptions have been recorded. The destroyed doorway, at 1.4 metres wide, is broad enough to suggest a relatively modest but functional entrance, yet even that has not survived intact. The site was documented as part of an archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district, including the Lough Mask and Lough Carra area, compiled by D. Lavelle in 1994, though the church itself almost certainly predates that record by centuries. The surrounding rock outcrop and scrubland, typical of this part of south Mayo where thin soils sit over a fractured limestone plateau, would have made the location austere even when the chapel was in use.