It appears on Tim Robinson's 1977 map of the area simply as "Penal chapel", a label that carries considerable weight. Penal chapels were the improvised, deliberately inconspicuous places where Catholics in Ireland gathered for Mass during the eighteenth century, when the Penal Laws restricted Catholic worship and made any substantial or permanent church building a liability rather than an asset.

Writing in 1980, a researcher named Cunningham described the structure as a tiny, roughly built building measuring just three metres by four, with a small ante-room attached, three metres by two. Even by the standards of clandestine worship, these were modest dimensions. When the site was inspected again in 1997, the building itself had effectively vanished. What remained was a traceable collapse of stone running about twelve metres in length and between four and six metres wide, oriented roughly north-north-east to south-south-west, with no clear wall or foundation stones distinguishable from the general rubble. The whole area had grown dense with hazel scrub, and the fallen stones were thick with moss. A bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more cup-shaped depressions often associated with early Christian or pre-Christian ritual activity, had been noted by Cunningham as being present at the site, but by 1997 it could not be found at all.