The ruins measure just three metres north to south and eight and a half metres east to west, the walls surviving to a maximum height of only one and a half metres, and even that much is described as poorly preserved. It is a modest footprint, barely larger than a generous room, yet the very compactness of it speaks to a form of religious architecture that long predates the elaborate stonework of medieval parish churches.

The site is associated with the former island of Inishrobe, and the presence of beehive-like huts to the north-west and west is the detail that gives the place its deeper interest. These corbelled stone structures, rounded and domed, are characteristic of Early Christian monastic settlements in Ireland, where small communities of monks built tightly clustered cells alongside their oratories. If the origins here do indeed reach back to that period, the site may once have functioned as a minor monastic enclosure, the kind of isolated, water-ringed foundation that Irish Christianity favoured in its early centuries. The church was eventually abandoned in favour of a later building nearby, a sequence that was common enough as communities outgrew their founders' spare arrangements and required something more substantial. Knox, writing in 1908, noted the site, though by then it had already long since passed out of active use.