The steps themselves are only 0.7 metres wide, neat and deliberate, climbing from the south to reach a pair of stone-revetted terraces cut into the hillside and extending roughly east to west. Stone revetment here means the terrace edges are faced and reinforced with dry stonework to hold the slope, a technique that speaks to considerable effort on difficult terrain. Below and to the west, the ground opens out to sweeping views of St Finan's Bay and the Skellig islands, those jagged Atlantic outcrops that loom at the edge of the known world in early Christian imagination.

The site takes its name from Cill Buaine, the church of St Buonia, also known as Beoanigh, who local tradition held to be a sister of St Patrick. That claim is unlikely to be historically verifiable, but it points to the prestige such associations carried in early medieval Ireland, where proximity to Patrick's lineage conferred enormous spiritual authority. Writing in 1893, O'Donoghue raised alternative attributions: that the foundation might instead be credited to St Brendan, the sixth-century navigator-monk deeply associated with the Kerry coast, or to St Beoanus, described as one of Brendan's disciples. The site sits at the head of a broad valley known locally as The Glen, a sheltered location of the kind that attracted early Christian hermits and monastic communities across the Irish west. Accounts published by Lynch in 1902 and by Henry in 1957 remain among the few detailed descriptions available, as permission to carry out a full archaeological survey of the site was refused, leaving its physical character only partially documented.