What makes the place quietly strange is the layering: beneath the early nineteenth-century ruin almost certainly lies the footprint of a medieval church, yet nothing of that earlier structure is visible at ground level. The history has to be read backwards, from absence.

The medieval church of Leny was recorded as early as 1302 to 1306, when papal taxation documents valued the church of 'Lene' in the deanery of Mullingar at nine marks annually. It appears on the Down Survey map of Corkaree barony, produced between 1656 and 1659, and again on Sir William Petty's map of 1685, suggesting it remained a functioning landmark well into the seventeenth century. By 1810, the church was recorded as being in the process of rebuilding. The present structure dates to around 1817, a four-bay hall with a three-stage square tower to the west, its parapet finished with English-style crenellations. The tower retains timber quatrefoil and Y-tracery details, and the east gable holds a triple-light geometric window with traces of stained glass still in the openings. A single-storey chancel and vestry were added to the east end later in the nineteenth century, built in snecked limestone, a construction method in which stones of varying sizes are fitted together to avoid continuous horizontal joints. The church was still roofed as recently as 1966, when aerial photographs confirmed its intact condition; sometime between then and the early 1980s the roof was lost.

The site sits within a rubble stone boundary wall entered through decorative cast-iron gates on square cut stone piers, with mostly nineteenth-century grave markers surrounding the church. The graveyard itself may preserve the outline of the medieval ecclesiastical enclosure, though the medieval church that once stood here left no trace above ground that anyone has yet been able to find.