What stops you in your tracks, once you are close enough to read the stonework, is a piece of cloister arcading from Jerpoint Abbey, a Cistercian house 6.5 kilometres to the north-east, now fixed to the top of the church's reduced north wall. Someone, at some point, carried it here and used it as a grave-marker. It is an arresting detail: a fragment of one of the most significant medieval monasteries in Ireland, repurposed quietly among the headstones of a small rural graveyard.

The church itself dates to the twelfth century and follows the undivided single-cell plan typical of Romanesque construction in Ireland, measuring roughly fourteen metres east to west and just over six metres north to south. The quality of the original craftsmanship is still legible in the stonework. The main west doorway, round-headed with cut-stone voussoirs and chamfered imposts, tapers slightly as it rises, and the jambs carry a vertical roll-moulding at the angle, a decorative technique repeated at all four external corners of the building. A curious carved stone projects westward from the top of the north-west quoins. The historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, called it a "clock-stone", though this interpretation has never been satisfactorily explained; it may simply have been a decorative terminal for the roof coping, or could even be a displaced stone from later repair work. The east gable, leaning outward under its own weight, was stabilised by two external buttresses, probably added in the late nineteenth century. The church was dedicated to St Muicin, or Muicceen, a bishop whose feast day fell on the 4th of March, and before the Dissolution of the Monasteries it belonged to the Priory of Kells. The graveyard enclosure itself sits within a slightly larger circular earthwork, suggesting a much older sacred boundary beneath the present walls.

The building's fabric is a layered record of repair, modification, and improvisation across several centuries. A narrow pointed doorway in the south wall, though largely rebuilt, may preserve original jambs from an entrance that once led to a sacristy. One of the triangular window heads on the south wall was found lying loose and reset in its current position during Office of Public Works repair work in 1935. A window in the south wall, already reduced to a single jamb by 1839 when it was measured and described in the Ordnance Survey Letters, has since deteriorated further. The north wall is largely gone. What remains is not a ruin that has been tidied into legibility, but one that has accumulated its own complicated history of loss, salvage, and accidental preservation.