It is what survives of Killeenatrava, a medieval religious house whose west gable, measuring 3.8 metres across, still carries a narrow window set into a splayed embrasure, the outward-angled recess that was a common device for drawing light into thick stone walls. Short returns of the north and south walls remain attached, suggesting where the building's full footprint once ran, but beyond that the structure is featureless, stripped back to bare stone.

The building began its life as a dependency of the Arroasian nuns of Kilcreevanty, a community founded from Cong Abbey at the end of the twelfth century. The Arroasians were a reformed order of Augustinian canons and canonesses who followed the customs of the Abbey of Arrouaise in northern France, and their houses spread across Ireland during the twelfth-century reform of the Irish church. Cong, on the isthmus between Lough Corrib and Lough Mask, was a significant centre of that network, and Kilcreevanty in turn founded dependent houses of its own, of which Killeenatrava was one. The precise date of foundation is not recorded beyond that broad late-twelfth-century frame, and little is known of the community's subsequent history.

The ruin is conserved by the owners of the holiday complex within whose grounds it sits, which at least accounts for the gable's continued presence. The setting is unassuming, a fragment of medieval religious life folded into an entirely domestic landscape, easy to pass without registering what it is or what it once represented.