It is barely knee-height, running about six metres east to west with short returns at either end, and gives little indication of what it once was. Locally it has long been known as the "Fire House", a name carrying implications far older than the medieval cathedral it neighbours.

A plan drawn in 1743, later reproduced by Caulfield in his 1882 work on Cloyne, shows a small rectangular structure with a pathway passing through it near the graveyard's northeast corner. Caulfield recorded that the building had been traditionally described as a pagan structure, though the traditions attached to it are layered and not easily untangled. Writing in 1910, Coleman noted a separate belief that the relics of St. Colman, the sixth-century founder of the see of Cloyne, were once kept here, until they were removed and the building largely demolished during the eighteenth century. A further tradition pulls in a different direction again, associating the structure with a sacred perpetual fire of the kind famously maintained by the nuns of St. Brigid at Kildare. That a single modest ruin should accumulate such contradictory identities, pagan sanctuary, relic shrine, and eternal flame, suggests it occupied a charged place in local memory long after its original function had been forgotten. What survives today is a featureless length of walling roughly 0.45 metres high, most likely the east wall, with nothing in the stonework itself to settle any of the competing claims.