On the first edition it was still standing, marked as a ruin; by the second, the cartographers had downgraded it further to a bare notation, "site of". What remains at Ankail on the Iveragh Peninsula today is less than even that modest designation might suggest: a shallow rectangular depression in the ground, measuring roughly 5.5 metres north to south and 4.6 metres east to west, edged by a low stony bank that barely reaches half a metre in height on its northern side. It is the ghost of a building rather than the building itself.

The church was a small rectangular structure, its longer axis oriented roughly west-northwest to east-southeast, positioned close to the eastern boundary of a surrounding enclosure. That enclosure is itself a significant detail; early Irish ecclesiastical sites were commonly defined by a curving or rectilinear boundary, known as a cashel or enclosing bank, which set the sacred ground apart from the secular landscape around it. The church's alignment and setting both suggest a site of some antiquity, though the documentary record is thin. What the ground does preserve, quietly and without ceremony, is the presence of burials within the interior of the depression. The dead remain even after the walls that once sheltered their interment have dissolved back into the earth.