The outlines of a church, a cloister, and domestic buildings survive within a roughly rectangular graveyard, their stones largely robbed out or sunk beneath the turf. A single piscina, a small stone basin set into the chancel wall and used for draining water after the washing of sacred vessels, is the only architectural feature still identifiable above ground. Earlier observers recorded a large window in the rounded Romanesque style in the same area, but that too has since vanished. The whole complex sits in grassland with the River Clare and open bogland stretching away to the west.

The house was founded around 1200 by Cathal Crovderg O'Conor, a King of Connacht, initially as a Benedictine monastery. Sometime before 1223 it had shifted allegiance to the Arroasian rule, a reformed branch of the Augustinian canons that spread widely across Ireland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and Kilcreevanty went on to become the mother house for that order in Connacht. The scale of the original community can be partially read from an inquisition of 1543, which catalogued what the house then possessed: a church and belfry, a dormitory, a hall, three chambers, and a kitchen, all within a precinct of two acres. The church itself measured roughly twenty metres in length, with a nave and a slightly narrower chancel. The probable cloister adjoining it to the south measured around twenty-eight metres by fourteen. Several cut-stone fragments of thirteenth-century date still lie scattered across the site. A holy tree and traces of an associated field system have been recorded nearby, adding further texture to what was clearly a working monastic landscape over several centuries.