The windows on the north and south walls have been blocked up, and later cut-stone surrounds were inserted at the western end of those walls and in the eastern gable, small but telling signs that this fragment of a medieval or post-medieval structure was actively modified rather than merely abandoned.

The family responsible was the Trenches of Sopwell Hall, local gentry who claimed this remnant of a church as their own mortuary space. The surrounding graveyard is substantial, measuring roughly 77 metres north to south and 71 metres east to west, and it contains headstones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the markers of an ordinary parish community in the fields around a building that the Trenches had quietly privatised at its eastern end. The conversion of a church chancel or east wall into a family burial enclosure was not uncommon among Anglo-Irish landed families; it was a way of marking social distinction even in death, separating the family plot architecturally from the graves of their neighbours and tenants.