One nineteenth-century scholar, Atkinson, writing in 1883 to 1884, read the place-name as 'Cill-cait-iairn' and interpreted the carving as a representation of the 'iron cat' embedded in that name. O'Donoghue, writing in 1986, pushed back on this, arguing the name is 'Cill Chaitighearn', meaning the church of a person called Caitighearn, which would make the head a portrait of a saint rather than a peculiar feline emblem. The stonework itself offers no obvious resolution.

The church sits at the centre of a graveyard and measures roughly fourteen and a half metres long by just over seven metres wide. Enough survives to read the building in some detail: a pointed masonry arch over the south door, a round-headed east window with a splayed embrasure and an arched masonry head, an attic window in the west gable, wall-presses set into the east ends of both the north and south walls, and several further windows including one that has been blocked. The north wall has largely vanished, only a section of about three and a half metres running from the east gable still standing. The parish of Kilcatherine was united with the neighbouring parish of Killaconenagh in 1672, and the building has almost certainly been a ruin from around that time, its fabric slowly disaggregating over the three and a half centuries since it lost its congregation.