The site, on a gentle knoll above a valley terrace, looks more like a partially levelled rath, the earthwork enclosure common to early Irish settlements, than any recognisable ecclesiastical ruin. What survives of the place's religious past is not a wall or a doorway but a single carved stone, now built into the structure covering a nearby holy well.

That stone is a butterfly finial, a type of decorative roof ornament placed at the apex or gable of an early church, and this particular example dates to the 10th or 11th century. It measures roughly 59 centimetres high and 61 centimetres wide, and it carries a carved figure in relief: a standing, robed form with what appears to be a boss to one side and possibly another to the other. The scholar Tomás Ó Carragáin, writing in 2010, drew a comparison between its composition and the Romanesque doorway pediment at Roscrea Cathedral, where a robed Christ figure is flanked by rosettes. The finial was originally found loose in the graveyard and was later set into the holy well structure, where it acquired a new function as architectural fabric rather than ornamental carving. By 1839, the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded that the well structure had a cut-stone facing on the exterior, but those stones had already been taken for building material elsewhere, and it is possible they were once part of the vanished church itself. Ó Carragáin also raises the possibility that the finial did not originate at Clontubbrid at all, but may have travelled from the early medieval church at Freshford, roughly three kilometres to the south. The question of where it was carved, and which building it once crowned, remains open.