The walls of the small church that gives the field its name have long since collapsed to little more than two or three feet in height, their interior choked with briars. Rough stones stand upright among the undergrowth, the quiet markers of a burial ground where unbaptised children were interred until relatively recently. What the surface conceals, and what the hollows in the surrounding ground suggest, is that this was once a small ecclesiastical compound: a church, an enclosed space that may have served as a priest's dwelling or an additional cemetery, and perhaps other structures whose outlines have slowly dissolved into the grass.

The church is modest in scale, measuring roughly eleven metres in length internally, with walls about a metre thick throughout. By the time a local observer recorded it in 1841, it was already destroyed to its foundations, its mortar composition uncertain, its original dedication forgotten. A more substantial tradition, gathered from schoolchildren in Chapeltown in the late 1930s and preserved in the Dúchas Schools Collection, places the building at the centre of a much older landscape. Two large villages once occupied Fenit Island, one to the west at a place called Cuan Eamuin, another to the east near an old mill; the church, known locally as the Teampaillín, a diminutive Irish word for a small church, would have sat roughly between them. No trace of either village remains above ground, though ploughing occasionally turns up remnants. The same tradition is emphatic that the ruin has no connection to the nearby castle, built around 1650, and that the church was already ancient by the time that structure went up. A 1989 description goes further, attributing the foundation to St Baronthus, a contemporary of St Brendan (484 to 577 AD), said to have inspired Brendan's legendary Atlantic voyage by recounting his son Mernoc's search for the Land of Promise. Whether or not that attribution is sound, the association places this low scatter of limestone and brown stone within one of the oldest layers of Kerry's early Christian geography.