" The building is modest even by early Christian standards, measuring less than six metres in length and under four metres wide, and apart from a single trabeate doorway in its western gable, meaning a doorway formed with a flat, horizontal lintel rather than an arch, it offers almost nothing in the way of decorative detail. That plainness is itself a kind of statement: this is early medieval religious architecture reduced to its bare essentials, a shelter for prayer and little else.

Documentation of the site goes back at least to George Henry Kinahan, who noted it in 1868, and Lord Killanin returned to it in his 1947 writings. The east-west orientation of the structure is typical of early Christian ecclesiastical buildings in Ireland, aligned so that worshippers faced east during prayer. Roughly a hundred metres to the south-east of the oratory lies a bullaun stone, a large boulder or outcrop bearing one or more cup-shaped depressions ground into its surface, possibly used for ritual purposes, the preparation of medicinal substances, or simply as a grinding hollow. The combination of an oratory and a nearby bullaun is not unusual in the Irish landscape; the two features often appear together at early Christian sites, suggesting a pattern of sacred use that extended beyond the walls of any single structure.