What it actually was, a parish church, a priest's residence, a domestic annex to the nearby Augustinian priory, or even the remains of a castle, remains genuinely open. The wall is limestone rubble laid in rough courses, and the doorway and window openings have been so thoroughly altered by later clearance schemes that their original form can no longer be read. The one feature that repays attention is a double-ope stoup, a basin for holy water with two openings, set into the east jamb of a doorway that no longer exists. It is carved with a foliage design and an angel holding a shield, a small piece of late medieval craftsmanship that somehow survived when almost everything around it did not.

The building's history, or rather the tangle of possibilities that passes for its history, reaches back further than its stonework might suggest. A church on or near this site was listed in the ecclesiastical taxation of the Diocese of Killaloe in 1302, and the location may be older still: Killanin and Duignan recorded a ninth or tenth-century gravestone near the east doorway, now lost, and noted the tradition that the church stood on the site of St Donán's monastery. A cross-inscribed slab recovered from the vicinity has also since disappeared. The wall's construction technique differs noticeably from that of the Augustinian priory sixty metres to the south, suggesting the two buildings belong to different periods, though how different is not established. The OS Namebooks preserve a local belief that the graveyard once ran continuously between the abbey and this building, the modern road that now separates them cutting through what was once a single ecclesiastical precinct. Complicating matters further, the historian Gleeson proposed that the remains might instead be those of O'Meara's castle of 1541, or the structure described in 1597 as a butt of a ruined castle with certain ruined chambers thatched, the latter mentioned in a grant given to Archbishop Miler Magrath covering the site of the former priory. Whether it began as a monastic foundation, became a parish church, and ended as a roofed shell pressed into secular use is one plausible reading, but the evidence does not quite close around it.