What makes the site quietly peculiar is what has happened at its western end: the collapsed gable wall has been built up and levelled with its own rubble to form a raised platform, on which a calvary now stands. The structure of the old church has effectively been cannibalised to create a new devotional object, so that the ruin and the religious monument occupy the same stones, the boundary between past and present worn thoroughly away.

The church is thought to have served as the parish church of Ballydoyle, and its neglect has deep roots. A Presentment to the Grand Jury of the County in 1576 recorded it as the Church of Temple Bally Dowle, describing it as "not kept according as it ought be, the church not built but standing in waste", suggesting the building was already in a poor state in the late sixteenth century. The structure itself is an undivided rectangle, roughly eighteen metres by seven and a half metres internally, built of limestone rubble in rough courses. Of the walls, only sections of the north and south faces remain upstanding to any meaningful height, while the east gable has been reduced to a grass-covered bank. The south wall has been repointed externally with concrete mortar at some point, though the internal face has been robbed out for material elsewhere. Inside, the ground is uneven and rises toward the east. Two table-top tombs occupy the interior; one, positioned near the western end, is dated 1722 and covers a vault beneath. A number of headstones stand among the ruins as well, their inscriptions no longer legible but apparently from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. A graveslab lies partially embedded in the ground close to the south wall near the eastern end, its surface pressed into the earth as though the site itself is slowly absorbing what remains.