Most burial enclosures follow the logic of rectangles or rough ovals, shaped by the land or the needs of a community. The one on the southern slope of a low hill near Killian, in County Galway, departs from that convention, its mortared stone wall describing an irregular triangle roughly 110 metres east to west and 60 metres north to south, with the county road running along two of its sides. Local tradition holds that a monastery once stood here, though what survives above ground is considerably more modest, and considerably more fragmentary, than that memory might suggest.

Within the enclosure stand two separate buildings, each in a different state of survival. The larger of the two is almost certainly a medieval parish church, a rectangular structure measuring over 16 metres in length, of which only the south wall remains standing to any real height, rising to about 3.5 metres and thickly covered in ivy. A gap near the western end of that wall is thought to mark where a plain pointed arch doorway once opened, a detail recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of the 1830s. The east wall has been reduced to footings, and the north and west walls have vanished entirely. Close to the west of this ruin stands a second, better-preserved building, smaller and oriented slightly differently, which is thought to date from the seventeenth or eighteenth century and may have served as a chapel. It retains a round-headed doorway in its west wall and a pair of opposing aumbries, small recessed wall-cupboards used to store liturgical vessels, set into the north and south walls. The eastern window is now blocked, partly by a modern concrete construction beneath it that functions as an altar and is topped with a cross. Set into this arrangement is a coat of arms, possibly that of the Cheevers family of Killian House, several of whom are believed to be buried inside the building. A burial vault is built against the exterior of the north wall at its western end, adding another layer to what is already a quietly layered site.