The grass-covered wall footings sit in the north-east quadrant of the graveyard, and the dressed stonework that once formed the church itself has been repurposed as grave-markers across the surrounding burial ground. It is an odd kind of recycling, the architecture of the living absorbed quietly into the landscape of the dead, and it means that the church is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the graveyard.

By 1840, when the Ordnance Survey letters recorded a detailed description of the ruin, the building was already badly diminished. The surveyor noted walls roughly 45 feet long and 22 feet wide internally, built of limestone cemented with lime and sand mortar, and standing at their greatest height to about 12 feet on the outside. One small quadrangular window survived in the north wall near the east gable, just two feet four inches wide on the inside and narrowing to seven inches on the exterior face, set about six and a half feet above the ground. The east gable was nearly gone, and the south wall had a large breach where the doorway had been. The name of the place carries its own layers. Thomas Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, recorded that Knocklong derives from the Irish Cnoc Loinge, meaning Hill of the Camp, and that the area is also called Druim Damhghaire in the Book of Lismore, identified as the traditional site of a battle in A.D. 250 when the High King Cormac mac Airt attempted to impose taxation on Munster. The parish sits within the old territory of Coshlea, and the name appears in various anglicised spellings across sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents.

The church site sits on elevated ground, which gives a sense of why it was chosen, and it is clustered with other monuments of note. O'Hurley's Castle lies roughly 60 metres to the north-north-east, and two holy wells, the kind of pre-Christian or early Christian water sources that frequently appear alongside medieval ecclesiastical sites, are about 150 metres to the north-east. A visitor who goes expecting upstanding masonry will be disappointed, but someone with patience for reading a graveyard carefully will find fragments of cut stone scattered among the headstones, each one a piece of a building that the 1840 surveyor could still, just about, describe in full.