At the foot sits a carved skull and crossbones, though any inscription has long since worn away. Around 1749, Isaac Butler was still able to read a Latin inscription on this same slab, recording William Gough and his mother Ann Cheevers, dated 1692. By the time FitzGerald examined it in the early twentieth century the text was already fading, and today nothing legible remains. The slab endures as a quietly eloquent object, its heraldry more durable than its words.

The church itself has a recorded history stretching back to the ecclesiastical taxation of Pope Nicholas IV, compiled between 1302 and 1306, which lists a church at Athlumney among the assessed parishes. By the time Archbishop Ussher made his visitation in 1622, both nave and chancel were already described as ruinous. Dopping's visitation of 1682 to 1685 noted that the building had been out of repair since 1641 and that the graveyard remained unfenced. What survives today is an undivided nave and chancel structure, nearly twenty-one metres long but barely six metres wide, with most of the south wall collapsed away and the remaining walls stripped of any decorative detail. Attached to the west end is a small rectangular tower, entered from the nave through a lintelled doorway; it retains double-splayed window openings and rises partly to its first floor, its west wall topped by an ivy-covered double belfry. An octagonal font, described in the 1860s as unornamented and measuring roughly eighteen inches across, was present at that time but has since disappeared entirely. The church sits within a D-shaped graveyard, its northern edge cut short by a road, and the whole site is closely surrounded by other medieval remains: a motte, a earthen mound raised by the Normans as the foundation for a timber fortification, lies about ninety metres to the south, and the tower house of Athlumney castle sits roughly eighty-five metres to the east, with the River Boyne running just beyond, and Navan on the far bank.