The church itself is modest, an undivided structure measuring roughly fifteen metres by four, with walls surviving to only half a metre or so in height and now heavily smothered in vegetation. The eastern end has been partitioned off as a family burial plot, and headstones dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth century are scattered both inside and outside the inner enclosure. A feature known locally as the Gates of Heaven was noted in a 1945 survey by a researcher named Price, who wondered whether it might be the remains of a megalithic tomb; more sober analysis suggests it is almost certainly a stile connecting the inner and outer enclosures. The name is arresting all the same.

The inner enclosure is D-shaped, roughly fifty-three metres east to west, and sits within the eastern edge of a much larger oval enclosure stretching over a hundred metres in each direction, its boundary following the line of the townland itself from south-east to north-west. That alignment between ecclesiastical and administrative geography is itself suggestive of considerable age. A road cuts through the whole site on a north-south axis, and a holy well sits in the northern portion, east of the road, a combination of church, enclosure, and well that is characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical settlements. The site carries a specific historical resonance too. According to the historian O'Toole, writing in 1890, it was here, described then as 'the old romantic burial ground of Kilranelagh', that Diarmuid, son of Aodh Ó Tuathail, Lord of Imail, was elected chieftain following his father's death in battle in 1376. The Uí Tuathail, anglicised as O'Toole, were the dominant Gaelic dynasty of this part of Wicklow, and the choice of this particular hillside enclosure for such a ceremony points to its standing as a place of significance well beyond ordinary parish use.

The site is open to the south, which is also where the views open out across the surrounding landscape. The church walls and enclosure banks are best approached with some care, given the degree of overgrowth, and the earthen banks defining the outer enclosure are most legible on the northern and eastern sides, where both internal and external stone facing remains visible.