At each of three bushes on the approach roads to the graveyard, mourners leave a wooden cross to commemorate every funeral that passes. The practice was noted as ongoing as recently as 1972, and by all accounts continues. It is the kind of ritual that tends to outlast the buildings it accompanies, and the church here has been in ruins for some time, its walls standing to roughly two and a half metres in places, its nave extended westward at some point, its chancel arch still intact. The inner face of the original nave walls was given a brick skin or plastered over, which means that whatever stonework lies beneath remains unexamined. Two corbels near the east end of the nave, one on the north wall and one on the south, may once have supported a rood loft, a screen-like platform that divided nave from chancel in medieval churches.

The church itself is probably of early foundation, set within a large rectangular graveyard enclosed by masonry walls. An aerial photograph has revealed a cropmark, the faint trace visible in dry-weather grass growth above a buried fosse, of a much older circular ecclesiastical enclosure roughly ninety metres in diameter, predating the rectangular layout and extending into the field to the east. Excavations in that field confirmed the fosse, about three metres wide, along with pits, a ploughed-out burnt mound, prehistoric and medieval pottery, and struck flints, suggesting a long sequence of activity well before the standing building. The chancel retains a two-light ogee-headed east window in Old Red Sandstone, its sill cut from granite, and the stonework has glazing-grooves, indicating it once held glass. Against the north nave wall stands a substantial limestone memorial, nearly two and a half metres tall, erected in 1647 by Richard Whitty to commemorate his parents, Walter Whitty of Ballyteige, who died in 1630, and Helena, daughter of Hammond Stafford of Ballyconor, who died in 1646. The plaque, inscribed in Latin with a prayer in English beneath, also records Richard's first wife, Catherine Devereux, who died in 1646. Nearby, a graveslab dated 1659 and bearing the initials P.FzN.M.R. was found in 1949 about a metre below the present ground surface, at what is likely the original ground level, with a collapsed tomb structure beneath it. The initials have been identified as those of Patrick FitzNicholl of Ballyharty and his wife, Mary or Margaret Rossiter of Rathmaknee. About 270 metres to the east-southeast lies the site of St Patrick's Well, where patterns, the traditional Irish gathering at a holy well combining prayer and festivity, were held each year on St Joseph's Day, the 19th of March.