Look more closely, though, and the stonework tells a different story. The wall's western end carries a base-batter, a slight outward slope at the foot of the masonry that was a common medieval technique for adding structural stability, and which here hints that this fragment may actually preserve part of the original north-west corner of a church that once measured roughly eighteen metres by eight metres and stood aligned east to west, as was conventional for Christian worship. Cut-stone fragments scattered around the graveyard are likely the dispersed remains of the same building.

The site sits on the northern face of a glacial ridge in undulating grassland, a landscape shaped by the slow deposit of material during the last ice age rather than by any human hand. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a complete rectangular church here, so the degree of loss since that survey is considerable. How much older the site might be is an open question. The scholar O'Flanagan, writing in 1927, suggested the possibility of early Christian origins, which would place its beginnings somewhere in the centuries following the fifth-century arrival of Christianity in Ireland, long before the Romanesque and later medieval building traditions that shaped most surviving Irish church ruins. Two holy wells lie close by to the north-east, and the remains of an enclosure were recorded about fifty metres to the south-west. The clustering of these features, church, wells, and enclosure, is a pattern associated with early ecclesiastical settlements, where a religious community would occupy a defined space with spiritually significant water sources nearby.