What makes this particular church unusual is not just its age but its company: it is the third of three ruined churches that stand within a single ecclesiastical enclosure, all within a short distance of one another, all now protected as national monuments in State Care. The building itself is small and largely reduced, its interior measuring roughly 6.7 metres by 3.6 metres, but the eastern gable has survived close to its original height of 3.5 metres, which gives the ruin a presence disproportionate to its modest footprint.

The fabric of the church is roughly coursed limestone, raised on a narrow plinth, and what little architectural detail survives is concentrated in that eastern wall. A narrow, round-headed window with a widely splayed interior opening, the splaying designed to maximise the spread of light inside a thick-walled structure, sits near the top of the gable. Beneath it is a small rectangular aumbry, a recessed wall cupboard used to store liturgical vessels or the reserved sacrament, which places this firmly in a tradition of early medieval ecclesiastical construction common across the west of Ireland. The remaining three walls stand only to around 1.4 metres and offer little further ornament or clue as to date. A gap of 1.2 metres at the western end of the southern wall marks where the doorway once was, the typical position for an entrance in Irish early church architecture.

The valley at Oughtmama is described as large and fertile, a quality that would have made it an attractive site for a monastic community dependent on farming the surrounding land. The presence of three churches within one enclosure suggests a site of some complexity and duration, though the historical record for Oughtmama as a whole remains thin. Walking the site, the ground-level relationship between the three buildings becomes the main thing to read: how they cluster, how this slightly more isolated example sits some 55 metres to the northeast of its neighbours, and how the limestone of the Burren, grey and unyielding above ground, has both built and slowly reclaimed everything here.