Whether or not the tradition is accurate, the ruin itself sits on a natural rise with the River Suir close to the north, and the arrangement of tower house, bawn (a walled enclosure typically surrounding such a fortified residence), and ruined church in such tight proximity gives the landscape an unusually layered quality.

The church dates from the late twelfth or thirteenth century, with modifications made at later periods. It is a long, undivided structure, nearly twenty-nine metres east to west, built mostly of limestone rubble with sandstone used for all the dressed architectural details. Two opposing pointed doorways near the west end of the north and south walls still carry their moulded surrounds. The north doorway, dateable to the thirteenth century, has the more elaborate roll and fillet-mouldings and is narrower and taller than the slightly earlier south doorway, which uses simpler roll-mouldings. The west gable rises to around seven metres and retains a blocked window embrasure at lower level and a long narrow opening at what would have been first-floor height; the wall is punctuated throughout by put-log holes, the sockets left by the horizontal timber scaffolding poles used during construction. The south wall shows a visible break in its masonry at roughly its midpoint, now stabilised by buttresses. Perhaps the most curious details are the two windows in the south wall, whose heads appear to be re-used architectural fragments from elsewhere, one of them carrying a flat ogee-head with hood-moulding, a profile more commonly associated with later medieval decorative work. Sandwiched between these two windows, a stretch of internal wall has been rendered with cement and fitted with a modern black marble plaque, a jarring intrusion into stonework eight centuries old. The east gable has largely collapsed, leaving only the southern splay of its window embrasure.