What makes the place quietly arresting is not the ruin itself but the questions it raises. A large flat lintel spans that north-wall doorway, and until at least 1980 a bullaun stone sat somewhere on the site. Bullauns are bowl-shaped hollows ground into boulders, associated in Ireland with early Christian and sometimes pre-Christian activity, and their presence at a site is often taken as a marker of considerable age. By 1987 the bullaun had vanished entirely, noted as missing in the literature, which gives the place an additional layer of loss.

The chapel appears on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 as Formoyle R.C. Chapel, and by the 1916 edition it was already marked as a ruin. It fell out of use around 1870, when St Patrick's Church was built in the nearby village of Fanore, leaving this small building to decline into the condition it holds today. The structure itself is rectangular, roughly 13.5 metres east to west and 7.3 metres north to south, with a partial south transept still traceable for about five metres along its west side. The walls, built from randomly coursed unworked limestone blocks without any dressing or shaping, are 0.65 metres thick. Two narrow pointed-arched windows pierce the north wall, one beside the doorway and one at the east end, both surviving only partially above the collapsed material at their bases. An association with an early saint, St MacCreedy, also known as MacCreiche, has been noted in connection with Formoyle, though the evidence is circumstantial. The large lintel and the now-absent bullaun are the most tangible hints that something older may underlie the post-medieval chapel.

About 130 metres to the north-north-west lies the recorded site of a holy well called Tobair Bhrain, a name that translates roughly as Bran's Well. Holy wells in Ireland were frequently focal points of local devotion long before and alongside formal church structures, and the proximity of a named well to a chapel with possible early associations adds another thread to an already layered site. The well's site is recorded rather than visible in any developed sense, and the church itself is poorly preserved, so what the place offers is atmosphere and suggestion rather than clear architectural reading.