The motivation appears to have been numerical: the island's reputation rested partly on the claim that it held seven churches, and if the count fell short, an obliging reclassification could remedy that. R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1916 and 1917, noted the ruse with some scepticism, and the building has been recorded as a domestic structure ever since.

The foundations, sitting about forty metres northeast of the island's Saint's Graveyard on the eastern shore, describe a two-roomed building of drystone masonry, a construction technique in which stones are laid without mortar, relying on their own weight and fit for stability. Macalister recorded its dimensions as roughly ten metres by five, with walls still standing to about ninety centimetres when he examined them, and a central chimney serving back-to-back fireplaces. The Board of Works cleared the interior in 1879 and 1880, yet even after that intervention the floor was found to slope steeply. When Liam de Paor excavated the site in 1970, finds were sparse: two fragments of querns, the rotary hand-mills used for grinding grain, one near the western fireplace and one in the southeast corner, along with a whetstone east of the chimney. Macalister had speculated that this might be the "one house" noted in an early seventeenth-century report attributed to a Bishop Rider, but de Paor, working from the excavated material, placed the building's occupation in the mid-eighteenth century. After it fell into disuse, the ruin served for a time as a rubbish dump.

By 2016, the area around the foundations had become completely overgrown and was recorded as inaccessible, so what a visitor might actually see today is uncertain. Inis Cealtra itself is reached by boat from Mountshannon and is better known for its round tower, early medieval grave slabs, and the ecclesiastical remains that gave rise to the church-counting controversy in the first place.