An apse is a semicircular or rounded projection, more commonly associated with continental Romanesque or early medieval architecture than with modest rural Irish churches, and its presence here gives the building an quietly distinctive profile. A single narrow, round-headed window lights this eastern recess, while three evenly spaced windows of similar form punctuate both the north and south walls, and a doorway opens at the west end. The whole structure measures roughly 16 metres east to west and just over 7 metres north to south.

The church stands at the western edge of a rectangular graveyard, approximately 40 by 30 metres, enclosed by an earth and stone bank with an external facing of drystone walling and a fosse, or ditch, running along the outside. The bank itself varies in height between 0.2 and 1.6 metres, and the fosse reaches about half a metre in depth. This kind of enclosed ecclesiastical precinct, defined by a bank and external ditch, is a recognisable feature of early Irish religious sites, though the 18th-century headstones still present inside the church show that the site remained in use as a burial place long after the building itself fell out of regular worship. Perhaps most striking in terms of the wider landscape is what lies 150 metres to the northeast: a motte, the raised earthen mound that formed the defensive core of a Norman fortification. The proximity of the two monuments, church and motte, points to a period when Norman settlers were reshaping both the physical and religious geography of Wicklow after the late 12th-century invasion.