An Díseart, the hermitage, points to a founding impulse older than the medieval walls now standing there: the early Irish monastic practice of withdrawal, of seeking out a remote or marginal place to settle in solitary devotion. The three surviving walls, the west gable rising to over three metres and heavily colonised by ivy, the south wall with a gap that may once have been a doorway, and the low remnant of the north wall, are all that remain of a small rectangular building no more than 6.5 metres wide. The east wall has vanished entirely, so the church's original length cannot be measured. A buttress projects from the north end of the west wall, extending some 8.5 metres along it, and the west gable retains enough of its pitched profile to confirm that the building once had a sloping roof. No windows are visible, though the extent of the ivy makes any firm conclusion difficult.

The saint associated with the site is Dicleth O'Triallaigh, whose nickname Triallach means the wanderer or rambler, a title earned through a remarkable founding legend preserved by the seventeenth-century scholar Duald MacFirbis. According to this account, Triallach's half-brothers, wishing to prevent him from leaving to seek God, bound him with an iron fetter linking his head to his feet and threw the key into the sea, where a salmon swallowed it. Triallach nonetheless escaped, sailing round the west of Ireland in an uncovered currach, the fetter still in place and the salmon accompanying him, until he came ashore at Disert Triallaigh on the bank of the River Cashen. His half-brothers eventually tracked him down there. A local fisherman cast his net and drew up three salmon; in the belly of the one given to Triallach, the key was found, and the fetter was opened. The iron fetter, known as the Glasán Triallaigh, was reportedly preserved afterwards as a miraculous reliquary. The parish church recorded at the site in the 1302 papal taxation of the Diocese of Ardfert, valued at 26 shillings and 8 pence per annum, was by the late medieval period held under the patronage of the abbot and convent of Rattoo. By 1615, the Royal Visitation noted that a minister named John Drea was resident and teaching school, the church's revenues directed towards its repair. By 1756 it was already recorded as a ruin.

The site sits within an active graveyard, and an ancient road known as White Horse Ridge once ran from the church through the bog northward to Rattoo. The ivy that cloaks the walls continues to work at the mortar, and the masonry is described as being in fair to poor condition, the rubble-stone construction gradually loosening under the weight of growth.