That ambiguity suits the place. The ruins of Kilbonane church sit in a working graveyard, still receiving the dead, and the building itself is a layered thing, its roughly coursed sandstone walls still standing to around four metres in places, its interior entirely taken over by headstones and grave-plots dating from the nineteenth century to the present day.

The church is dedicated to Saint Benignus, a fifth-century figure associated with Saint Patrick, and was recorded under that name in 1841. The fabric visible today is a rectangular structure measuring just over twenty-one metres east to west and eight metres north to south, with walls of rubble sandstone bonded and internally rendered with lime mortar. Entry is through a pointed doorway in the south wall near the west end, which has a segmental arched embrasure and rough stone voussoir above it. Two narrow pointed lights in the east wall, each only twelve centimetres wide, are cut from sandstone with an external rebate and chamfer, and a wall-press, a small recess built into the masonry for storing liturgical objects, survives in the south wall alongside the ghost of a splayed window. Local tradition holds that the church, which was thatched, was burnt by Cromwellian troops, a fate shared by a great many Irish churches during the 1650s campaign. Earlier records note a belfry on the west gable, now gone, and a rectangular window is still visible high in that same gable wall.

One further absence is worth noting. An ogham stone, one of those upright pillar stones inscribed in the early medieval Irish script that uses a series of notches and lines along a central stem, was formerly held in the vault at the east end of the church. It has since been moved to Coolmagort in Beaufort, a few kilometres to the east, leaving behind only its absence in the ruin where it once stood.