It is roughly three metres wide, has a crudely formed pointed arch, and its piers project inward in a way that suggests it was once part of something considerably more substantial. The arch is not refined work; a scholar writing about it used the phrase "very rude pointed arch," meaning rough and unfinished rather than offensive, and that description still holds. What makes it genuinely odd is not its construction but its situation: absorbed into a later wall, unrecorded on official mapping, and surrounded by the quiet debris of a vanished domestic world.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the gateway in the early twentieth century, drawing on an earlier account by Wardell published in 1904. At that time the gate was already "built up" in a more modern wall, its original context largely lost. The site sits 170 metres south-west of the Augustinian nunnery of Monasternagalliaghduff, a place whose name translates roughly as the monastery of the black foreign women, and about 200 metres south of the former Old Abbey House. Close by are the remains of a dovecote, an orchard, a fish pond, and a standing stone, the kind of cluster that suggests a long-occupied estate slowly dissolving back into farmland. The most arresting detail attached to the gateway is a local tradition recorded by Wardell: that the Earl of Desmond once brought his dying wife to this spot, she having been wounded during their flight from Shanid Castle, which sits on a moated ridge to the south-west and would have been visible from the gate.

Accessing the site requires some care, as it lies in private pasture and is not marked on standard maps. The boundary wall in which the gateway sits was visible on aerial imagery as recently as April 2015, though the wall itself is described as overgrown. A standing stone 65 metres to the north-east offers a secondary point of reference when navigating the area. Visitors with an interest in the broader landscape might also look towards Shanid Castle to the south-west, which provides the geographical anchor for the Desmond tradition and gives the otherwise modest gateway a faint shadow of dynastic drama.