What makes this one worth a second look is the detail preserved in its stonework. The gables still stand to their full height, and the side walls, though partially collapsed and in places dangerously unstable, retain enough to read the building clearly. Three tall round-headed windows once lit the interior, one each in the east and west gables and a third at the east end of the north wall, with a rougher, flat-headed single-light window cut into the south wall at the west end. Corbels projecting from both side walls near the west end, combined with beam-holes visible in the west gable, point to the former existence of a gallery, suggesting a more layered interior life than the bare shell now implies.

The church is built of roughly coursed limestone rubble, with a base-batter, a slight outward slope at the foot of the walls designed to add stability, rising about a metre, and punch-dressed quoins, that is, corner stones finished with a patterned chisel texture, at the angles. Its internal dimensions run 18.4 metres east to west and 5.45 metres north to south, with walls around 0.8 metres thick. The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 identify it as the ancient church of Shankill, and by the nineteenth century it had already passed through at least one reinvention: O'Kelly, writing in 1985, notes it had been repaired at some point for Protestant divine service, a common enough trajectory for older Irish churches in the post-Reformation period. The entrance was at the west end of the south wall, though the opening has since been robbed out, leaving only a gap of just over a metre where dressed stone was presumably taken for use elsewhere.

The building sits roughly at the centre of a sub-rectangular graveyard and is set on a very slight rise within the parkland surrounding Shankill Castle, enclosed by a small wood. Despite the modest elevation, there are open views in most directions across the gently rolling valley floor.