Locally it is called Bishop's Quarter church; a modern plaque bolted to its outer wall proclaims it St Colman's Abbey; and the Ordnance Survey has marked it as Drumcreehy Church in ruins since at least the 1842 edition of its six-inch map. By that point it had already been a ruin for over two centuries, first recorded as such in 1615. The accumulation of names is itself a small puzzle, and the building rewards the confusion.

Tradition connects the site with a figure known as Mac Reithe of Kilmacrehy, an early Irish saint whose cult was also associated with a church on the north shore of Liscannor Bay. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing around 1900, dated the fabric to probably the eleventh century, and the structural evidence broadly supports an early medieval origin. The church is a two-part structure: a long chancel, its north and south walls still standing to 4.4 metres and the east gable rising to around 7.5 metres, joined to a much more ruined nave to the west. The chancel is entered through a pointed-arch doorway in the north wall, its hood-moulding and hanging-eye, the iron socket used to hang a door, still intact after centuries of exposure. The east gable holds a tall narrow window, barely eighteen centimetres wide but two and a half metres high, set within a round-arched embrasure with a rolled hood-moulding. Just below it, a row of chamfered limestone blocks may be the remains of an altar. An anta, a projecting flat buttress that is a characteristic feature of early Irish church architecture, survives at the junction of the east gable and the north wall. The nave is largely collapsed, its west gable swathed in ivy, though one opening in the south wall turns out on closer inspection to be a doorway that was later narrowed and converted into a window. The chancel interior is given over to burials from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among them the grave of Judge Comyn, remembered locally for organising employment in phosphate mines at Noughaval during the Second World War. Just west of the west gable lies a shell midden, a deposit of discarded shellfish remains, a reminder that this ridge sits within reach of the Atlantic coast and that people have been making use of this ground for a very long time.