The entry in the Annals of Innisfallen for AD 1037 records that Cu Chaille, son of Cennetaig and King of Musgraige, was slain there along with his son, the sanctuary of the altar offering no protection. It is the kind of episode that tends to get absorbed into the general background noise of early medieval Irish violence, yet here the building that witnessed it survives in recognisable form, altered and patched across many centuries but still present.

The church is a rectangular structure built with roughly coursed cyclopean masonry, a technique using very large, irregular stones laid without mortar or with minimal dressing, and it retains projecting antae, the characteristic lateral extensions of the side walls beyond the gable ends that are a hallmark of early Irish ecclesiastical architecture. The building is tentatively dated to the eleventh century or earlier, which would place its construction around the time of that killing. A later doorway was added in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and the western end of the church was subsequently converted into a two-storey priest's residence by inserting a barrel-vaulted ground floor, vaulting being a practical way to create a habitable upper storey above a stone ceiling. Further alterations followed in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. By the time of the Royal Visitation of 1615, the building was recorded in a state of partial collapse, described plainly as "chancell up church down." The large sub-rectangular graveyard surrounding the church contains two high crosses, one positioned roughly at the centre of the enclosure and one in the north-west quadrant, their presence suggesting the site's significance long predates the standing church itself.