What catches the attention is not so much the ruin itself, which is poorly preserved, its chancel completely gone and only partial stretches of the nave walls and the west gable surviving, but what those fragments still contain. Set into the east end of the north wall of the nave is an armorial plaque and graveslab dedicated to Walter Burke of Illeigh, erected in 1626 by a man named Patrick Kerin. The slab has outlasted almost everything around it.

The site traces its origins to the seventh century, when it was founded by St Culan, one of those early Irish monastic figures whose communities shaped the ecclesiastical geography of the country long before the Norman church imposed its own structures. What connects Culan most vividly to this hillside is an object discovered not in the church itself but in a hollow tree nearby, close to a holy well that still exists a short distance to the west. That object was a bell shrine, a reliquary of the kind made to house and venerate the hand bell of a founding saint. The bell shrine of St Culan, dated to the twelfth century and recorded by Cooke in 1822, is a remarkable survival, the sort of object that would now be held in a museum collection, its origin in a hollow tree in Tipperary uplands easily forgotten. The same episode of early nineteenth-century activity around the site also produced the discovery of an old mill near the church, found in 1821. The graveyard itself continued in use well into the modern period, with memorials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still present within the enclosure.