It is an easy thing to walk past without understanding what it marks, which is part of what makes Cill Buaine quietly arresting. The name itself, suggesting a early church foundation, points to a category of site that once formed the backbone of early Christian religious life in Ireland, small enclosed sanctuaries containing an oratory and associated structures, their boundaries as spiritually significant as anything within them.

The enclosure, originally oval in shape, was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, though a later north-to-south field wall has since cut through its eastern sector, and no trace of the enclosure survives east of that boundary. What remains internally measures roughly 21 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west. The northern edge is marked by a low curving scarp, revetted in places with upright slabs and drystone facing, with the remnant of a collapsed bank on top. The southern boundary survives as a poorly preserved rampart faced with large slabs and dry-stone walling, still standing to around a metre in height in places, curving westward toward a possible entrance gap of about 2.4 metres wide. Inside the enclosure, the oratory sits against the northern scarp; an oratory in this context is a small private or monastic prayer house, typically of early medieval date. Built in drystone with corbelled walls, a construction technique in which courses of stone are laid so that each projects slightly inward to form a self-supporting roof, it measures just 3.6 metres by 2.8 metres internally, with walls averaging 1.1 metres thick that still stand to 0.9 metres at the south-west angle. A gap in the west wall, approximately 0.7 metres wide, is thought to be the original doorway. Towards the centre of the enclosure stands a larger rectangular building, 6 metres by 4.2 metres, its stony bank enclosure containing two upright slabs that may once have served as grave-markers. A 6-metre run of further upright slabs lies just outside its north-west corner, suggesting the site retained a funerary function alongside its devotional one.

The stone cross standing 5.5 metres west of the enclosure, near what appears to be the entrance, is modest in scale but deliberate in placement. At 0.95 metres high and just 0.07 metres thick at the base, it is the kind of marker that rewards close attention rather than distance, a slender vertical presence that anchors the whole complex to a particular patch of Kerry hillside.