When Ordnance Survey officers visited in 1840, they recorded the ruined church with the kind of exacting detail usually reserved for intact buildings: the exact height of a surviving gable, the thickness of a lintel, the gap between a doorway and a wall. They even illustrated the small internal doorway that separates the nave from the chancel, a trabeate opening, meaning one formed with flat horizontal stones rather than an arch, which scholars now believe may belong to an earlier, pre-Norman single-cell church absorbed into the later medieval structure. The ivy, the officers noted, had already worked its way between the lintel stones, loosening them. That the building was raised without lime mortar at all, using only large stones and clay, makes its survival across several centuries all the more surprising.

The church is known as Kilquane, from the Irish Cill Chuáin, meaning the church of Cuán. It sits at the foot of a hill called Cahir, or Cathair, in the parish of the same name in Coshlea, County Limerick. A reference from 1291 records it as Kilcowan, and by 1410 it was noted as Keilchuain, dedicated to St Covan the abbot. The antiquary T.J. Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, recorded the nave and chancel dimensions as 38 feet by 22 and a half feet, with the chancel running to 14 feet in length. The internal doorway between the two spaces had a double lintel and inclined jambs, and it is this feature, carefully drawn in the Ordnance Survey Letters, that hints at the possibility of an older foundation beneath the medieval fabric. Several carved or worked stones from the church have since been removed from their original positions and now lie scattered across the graveyard.

The graveyard at Kilquane remains in active use, so the site is accessible, though the ruins themselves amount to little more than low wall fragments. Visitors looking closely will notice the displaced architectural stonework around the burial ground, pieces that once formed part of the church's fabric. The hill of Cahir rises behind the site, providing useful orientation. Two holy wells associated with the parish are recorded nearby: Tobereendowney Well in Ballyshaneboy and Lady's Well in Ballyshanedehey, though these lie at some distance from the church itself. The site rewards patience and close attention rather than any single dramatic feature.