The enclosing rubblestone walls drop to almost nothing along the southern edge, where blown sand from the shore has buried the capping stones almost entirely, leaving the boundary between the living and the dead barely distinguishable from the beach itself. Inside stands a roofless rectangular church, and within that church, a chi-rho cross-slab, one of the oldest categories of Christian monument in Ireland, carved with the overlapping Greek letters used as an early symbol of Christ. It is, by the time you have walked in through the galvanised gate or edged around the southern pier on the shore side, the only above-ground evidence that this place was already old when the medieval church was built.

The site takes its name from St. Senach, a seventh-century saint who left his mark on this particular stretch of Kerry coastline in more than one place. The island of Illauntannig, visible offshore, holds another early church foundation associated with him, and the name Kilshannig, from the Irish Cill Seanaigh, meaning the church of Senach, preserves his memory in the placename itself. The existing church structure belongs to the high medieval period, but the chi-rho slab pushes the site's origins back to around the seventh century, suggesting continuous religious use across more than a thousand years. About 350 metres north along the shore there is a large boulder known as Cloch an Turais, a name meaning roughly the stone of the journey or pilgrimage stone, which was formerly visited on Good Fridays as a devotional site, a practice recorded as recently as 1939.

A 2012 survey by Laurence Dunne catalogued fifty-one named modern headstones and seventy-five unnamed unhewn gravemarkers, the latter scattered across the northern and eastern parts of the graveyard. Eighteen tombs were recorded, most of the strong-box type, a raised rectangular chest form common in Irish graveyards, constructed from local rubble limestone and rendered white. Four lintelled graves are exposed, one just inside the southern wall of the church and three outside the east gable. The step-stile beside the entrance gate goes unused; most visitors simply slip around the pier on the seaward side, which feels, given everything else about this place, entirely in keeping.