It is older than the abbey that overshadows it, and it carries details in its stonework that reward anyone who stops to look closely: moulded limestone embrasures, angle buttresses with roll-moulding along their caps, a slender crenellated bell-tower grafted onto the building's corner, and a narrow vaulted chamber at the tower's base through which a chute was cut in the vault ceiling, presumably to carry the bell ropes down to whoever was pulling them.

The church was built around 1278 and dedicated to St Finghin, an early Irish saint associated with several sites across Munster. Its builder was Thomas de Clare, the Anglo-Norman lord who controlled much of County Clare in the latter decades of the thirteenth century. The fabric is roughly coursed limestone rubble, though the buttresses at the corners are cut from well-dressed ashlar, a more refined technique using carefully shaped and fitted stone blocks, and appear to be original to the thirteenth-century build. The bell-tower at the southwest angle is a later addition, dating to the fifteenth century, when the buttress there was adapted to carry the tower's base. Inside, the east gable retains its triple-light of graduated lancets, and the east window is flanked by two wall niches, one round-headed and likely intended for a statue, the other a depressed arch form that has partially collapsed. Traces of external harling, a lime render coating once common on Irish medieval buildings, survive on the east gable. At some point the original west doorway was closed or removed, and the principal entrance shifted to a doorway in the south wall, which still shows its hanging-eye and draw-bar hole, the fittings for a heavy wooden door hung and secured from within.

The church sits within a graveyard, though only the area to its south is clearly enclosed and in active use as such. An ecclesiastical enclosure is suggested on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, hinting that the site had a longer religious history before Thomas de Clare raised the present walls. The north wall of the church no longer survives above ground, replaced at some point by a later wall that may incorporate some of the original masonry at foundation level, which means the building reads today as a long narrow shell, open to the sky, with its more articulate stonework concentrated in the south wall, the east gable, and the corner tower.