Known locally as Teampall Chaomháin, the building dedicated to Saint Cavan sits so deep within the accumulated sand of the north-eastern shore that it now lies below the present ground level. The sand around it has been cleared and the surrounding banks shored up to hold further inundation at bay, but the sense of a structure being gradually reclaimed is inescapable. A modern graveyard occupies the dunes above and around it, the living burial ground pressing down on a far older one.

The church itself is a nave and chancel structure, the nave belonging to the Early Christian period and retaining a trabeate doorway in its west gable, that is, a doorway with a flat horizontal lintel rather than an arch, a form typical of early Irish ecclesiastical building. That doorway now connects to a later medieval sacristy added at the west end, which has a pointed arch entrance and a triangular-headed window in its south wall. The chancel, to the east, features a pointed arch and a transitional east window, the term transitional here suggesting a period of architectural shift, roughly the twelfth century, when Romanesque forms were giving way to Gothic ones. An altar sits below that window. Just to the north-east of the church, the grave attributed to Saint Cavan himself is almost entirely swallowed by sand, though it contains a cross-slab, a flat stone carved with a cross, of the kind documented by Higgins in 1987. In the wider vicinity there are traces of a midden, an ancient rubbish deposit that can indicate long domestic or monastic habitation, and a possible clochan, one of the dry-stone beehive huts associated with early Irish monasticism.

The site sits within a working graveyard, so access is straightforward, but the physical experience of it is unusual. Visitors descend to reach the church rather than approaching it at ground level, the walls rising from a cleared hollow while the dunes bank up on all sides. The cross-slab near the grave is easy to miss, largely submerged, and the possible clochan nearby requires some searching. The combination of early Christian fabric, medieval additions, and an ever-present geography of sand gives the place a layered, slightly disorienting quality that no amount of conservation work has entirely smoothed away.