A bawn is the fortified enclosure attached to a tower house or castle, and the proximity of church to castle here, linked by what appears to be a surviving trace of an old roadway across the intervening field, gives the site something of the feel of a planned landscape, two institutions of authority arranged along a spine of high ground.

The church is rectangular, measuring approximately 10 metres north to south and nearly 22 metres east to west, built from roughly coursed limestone masonry with a base-batter, meaning the walls angle slightly outward at their base for added stability. Two doorways face each other across the interior, set west of centre in the north and south walls. The southern doorway was reconstructed during a clean-up scheme in 1991, while only the lower jambs of a chamfered limestone doorway remain on the north side. A chamfered edge is one cut at an angle, a small decorative and structural refinement that hints at more careful original craftsmanship than what now survives. The east gable has been reduced to just four courses of stone, and the original east window is entirely gone. There is a small rectangular aumbry, a recessed wall cupboard used to store liturgical vessels, at the east end of the south wall. When John O'Donovan recorded the site in the nineteenth century, published later in O'Flanagan's 1930 edition of his Tipperary letters, he found it already well gone, describing it as an uninteresting ruin of around three centuries' age with all its features destroyed and a large gap in the east gable. The west wall's interior face was repointed during the 1991 works, so what a visitor sees today is partly the result of that intervention as much as time.