It is the central portion of what may or may not be a church, and that uncertainty is precisely what makes it interesting. Locally, people have always called it Balrath Church, yet no church is shown standing on this ground in any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, including the earliest, dated 1837. What those maps do show are two parallel walls, the north and the south, though not arranged in any way the cartographers chose to label as a building.

The surviving fragment, the central section of the south wall, stands 2.5 metres high and runs for only 2.2 metres in length, with a thickness of 0.85 metres. That thickness is itself a clue of sorts. Walls built of coursed rubble, that is, rough stone laid in rough but deliberate horizontal courses, at that kind of thickness tend to suggest construction before 1700. No trace remains of the east or west walls, which makes it difficult to establish the full dimensions of the structure or to read it confidently as a church at all. One alternative reading, noted in the site record, is that these walls formed a private burial enclosure rather than a place of worship. The rectangular plan, aligned east to west as churches conventionally are, keeps the question open without answering it. Balrath Castle lies about 320 metres to the east, and the whole site sits on the eastern end of a ridge, with open views in every direction, the kind of elevated, exposed position that suited both ecclesiastical and secular buildings in the medieval period.