The terraces, built from stone revetments, that is, retaining walls of stacked stone used to hold back the slope and create flat platforms for building, run roughly east to west along the gradient. The whole arrangement feels deliberate and considered, a small community making the mountain workable rather than simply enduring it.

The place is known as Cill Buaine, the church of Buonia, and it is associated with St Buonia, also called Beoanigh, who local tradition holds to have been a sister of St Patrick. Other accounts, cited by O'Donoghue writing in 1893, suggest the site was founded by St Brendan or by his disciple St Beoanus. These competing attributions are fairly common for early Irish ecclesiastical sites, and they say something about how important it was felt to be. The physical remains, described by Lynch in 1902 and by the architectural historian Françoise Henry in 1957, include two circular stone huts on the lower terrace, alongside the foundations of two rectangular buildings. The lower terrace itself measures approximately 24 metres north to south and 70 metres east to west, with its southern face largely collapsed. Just west of the present terrace limits, two parallel rows of upright slabs, each standing roughly 1.2 metres high and set about 3 metres apart, were interpreted by Henry as the remains of an entrance gateway. The upper terrace boundaries extend to delimit the lower one on both east and west, suggesting the two levels were conceived as a single, coordinated complex rather than piecemeal additions.

Access to the site has historically been restricted, and formal survey of the ground was refused, meaning the published accounts by Lynch and Henry remain the principal sources for what lies there. The valley below is known locally as The Glen, and the westward prospect from the slope takes in one of the more dramatic stretches of the Kerry coastline.