At Fohanagh, in the quietly rolling farmland of north County Galway, a ruined church clings to just that much. The east gable still stands, and with it a flat-headed window dressed in cut stone, the one architectural detail to have made it through centuries of decay and piecemeal rebuilding. The walls to the north and south survive only in fragments adjoining that gable; everything else visible in the structure today is modern masonry, added long after the original building had largely collapsed.

The church was laid out on an east-west axis, as was conventional for Christian worship, and measured roughly 16.8 metres in length and just over 5 metres wide, making it a modest but not unusually small example of a rural medieval or early post-medieval parish church. By the time the Ordnance Survey Letters were compiled in the nineteenth century, the building was already described as an old church nearly destroyed, a phrase recorded by O'Flanagan in 1927 drawing on those earlier observations. It sits on a gentle rise within what is now an irregularly shaped graveyard, the kind of continuously used burial ground that so often outlasts the church it once served, the living continuing to inter their dead long after the roof has gone and the walls have been reduced to their lowest courses.