The upper terrace alone stretches roughly fifty metres from east to west, held in place by coursed drystone revetment walls that rise to nearly two metres at their best-preserved end, coped with flat slabs and still reached today by a short flight of well-laid steps just seventy centimetres wide. One of those coping slabs carries a shallow rectangular depression whose purpose is not recorded. Perched near the head of a broad valley known locally as The Glen, the whole site faces westward over St Finan's Bay toward the Skelligs, the jagged Atlantic outposts associated with early Irish monasticism at its most extreme.

The place is known as Cill Buaine, a name that preserves the memory of St Buonia, also written as Beoanigh, who is locally said to have been a sister of St Patrick. That connection to the most famous name in Irish Christianity gives the site a particular weight in local tradition, though scholars have also proposed that it was founded by St Brendan, or alternatively by St Beoanus, a disciple of Brendan, a suggestion noted by O'Donoghue as far back as 1893. Whatever the precise origin, the cluster of monuments gathered towards the western end of the upper terrace tells its own story: an oratory, a leacht, a gable-shrine, a cross-slab, and a stone cross. A leacht is a low rectangular cairn or altar used for prayer and commemoration, common at early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites, and its presence here alongside a gable-shrine and carved stonework marks this as a place of some devotional complexity rather than a simple hermit's enclosure. Accounts by Lynch in 1902 and Henry in 1957 have provided most of what is formally known about the site, since more recent requests to carry out a full survey were refused.