The structure is modest and badly broken: a rectangular mortared-stone shell, roughly 7 metres by 3, with only the west gable still standing to something close to its original height of 4.5 metres. The rest has collapsed into grassed-over rubble, the east gable reduced to a foundation line you could walk over without noticing. What makes the place quietly arresting is not the ruin itself but the density of things clustered around it: penitential stations, a holy well fourteen metres to the north-east, a possible enclosure half-consumed by undergrowth, and a cave twenty metres to the south-west that is reputedly where the founding saint lived as a hermit. Three fulachtaí fia, the burnt-mound sites associated with Bronze Age cooking or bathing, lie within sixty metres to the east, suggesting the platform was a place of some significance long before Christianity arrived.

The saint in question is Colmán Mac Duach, founder of Kilmacduagh monastery in County Galway, who was of the Uí Fhiachrach of Aidhne, a dynasty with lands across North Clare and Galway. The site is thought to have been founded around AD 620, a date drawn from the Life of St Colman Mac Duach, a seventeenth-century compilation. According to that tradition, Colmán and a servant fasted here for seven years and forty days, at which point a great feast was miraculously lifted from the table of King Guaire Aidne and carried to them. The king followed his meal, found the saint, and was so moved by the fast that he offered his lineage to Colmán in perpetuity. The servant fared less well: he died after overindulging in the feast and was supposedly buried about 360 metres to the south-east. The route King Guaire took with his army is said to have left a trace on the landscape, and a feature named Bohernamias on nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps, roughly 350 metres to the north-east, was understood to mark that passage, its name becoming associated with the karstic erosional grooves of the limestone. Parish namebooks from 1839 record that stations were still being performed at Keelhilla by local people, with a patron held on the last Sunday of summer. The folklorist Máire MacNeill, writing in 1962, identified this as the only known Lughnasa gathering place in the Burren. Lughnasa, the early August festival marking the beginning of harvest, survived in many parts of Ireland as a pattern day or pilgrimage attached to a saint's feast, often at a site with much older associations. A fragment of an Iron Age beehive quern, a type of rotary hand mill, found embedded in the very platform the church stands on, is now held in Ennis museum.