The surrounding pasture is ordinary enough, and the ground drops sharply just six metres to the north, giving way to a flat, poorly drained expanse that runs about 250 metres to the shore. But the masonry repays closer attention. The basal courses are formed from enormous sandstone blocks, some measuring over a metre square, laid in a manner that the nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan described, when he visited in 1838, as "nearly in the Cyclopean style", a term borrowed from classical archaeology for construction that relies on massive, closely fitted stones rather than mortar and small fill. The east gable, he noted, still carried a window in the "primitive round lancet style", an early arched opening consistent with medieval Irish church building.

O'Donovan also recorded something older still attached to this place. He noted that a "Church of Kilroe Mor in the country of Amalgadia" is mentioned in the Tripartite Life of St. Patrick, a medieval hagiographical text that weaves together accounts of the saint's journeys and the churches he was said to have founded or blessed across Ireland. Whether that reference genuinely connects to this site or simply shares a placename is impossible to say with certainty, but it plants the church in a landscape of early Christian memory. The rectangular building measured roughly 7.3 metres long by 5.4 metres wide according to O'Donovan's account, and today sod-covered wall footings still trace that outline. The surviving section of north wall, eight metres long and standing nearly 2.8 metres on its exterior face, has been pressed into service as part of a later east-west field boundary, which is probably the reason it survived at all. Inside the ruin, a row of low upright slabs running north to south forms what appears to be an internal partition, and a fragment of worked stone, likely from a window arch or doorway, lies among the rubble.

About fifteen metres to the north, in the low-lying ground between the knoll and the bay, there is a possible holy well. Holy wells in Ireland are typically small natural springs that acquired religious associations, often linked to a local saint, and frequently maintained as sites of informal devotion long after the churches nearby fell out of use. The proximity here, tucked just below the church on waterlogged ground near the shore, fits that pattern neatly.