A grass-covered sliver of south wall, roughly twelve to fourteen metres long and barely half a metre high, plus a short return of the east wall measuring three metres, is all that remains above ground of a church that was already being described as levelled by 1839. Scattered among the surrounding graveyard are architectural fragments and dressed stone that probably once formed part of the building, but the foundations themselves were cleared away in the late 1930s, apparently by local hands. The Ordnance Survey's 1840 six-inch map still named the structure as a ruin; by the 1916 edition, the cartographers had downgraded even that, marking the spot simply as a "Site of".

The place was known as Cill-Tonachta, a name recorded by the nineteenth-century scholar John O'Donovan, whose topographical work documented countless such sites across Ireland before they disappeared entirely. T. J. Westropp, the Clare antiquarian who catalogued the county's ecclesiastical remains around 1900, noted the church under the spelling Kiltonaghta and confirmed it had been levelled since 1839. The structure sits at roughly the centre of a graveyard, which is itself enclosed within a wider ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of curved or sub-circular boundary that typically marks an early medieval Christian foundation in Ireland, sometimes predating the Norman period by centuries. The hill it occupies, set among undulating poor pastureland, would have made it visible from a considerable distance in every direction, which may partly explain why an early community chose the spot.

The site rewards the particular kind of attention that asks not what is there, but what was removed and when. The dressed stone fragments in the graveyard, the slight ridge of the surviving wall barely rising from the grass, and the enclosure boundary still readable in the landscape are, collectively, more legible than a first glance suggests.