The structure, roughly eighteen metres along its longer axis and built with lime mortar, has been partially dismantled within living memory, and the interior holds a depression at its southern end whose original purpose is unclear. Running away from the river for about thirty-four metres, a separate thinner wall connects to a small enclosed room that locals have long called "the flower house", though whether that name carries a practical or devotional meaning has not been recorded. Two further cells were described in the 1940s somewhere close by but cannot now be found on the ground.

The site was a place of refuge for Franciscan friars from Muckross Abbey, the substantial friary on the shores of Lough Leane a few kilometres to the west, and they appear to have sheltered here until around 1780. Muckross itself had been suppressed in the sixteenth century but continued to be occupied intermittently by friars under increasing pressure, and a quieter outpost like Faghbane, tucked into riverside pasture, would have offered some insulation from official attention. Gwynn and Hadcock, writing in 1970, identify Faghbawn as a known place of refuge for the order. Across the river to the east, reachable by a set of stepping-stones that are still there, lies a children's burial ground known as the "friar's plot", a name that preserves the connection between the community of friars and the local population who depended on them for pastoral care when Catholic worship had no legal standing.