That surviving south wall, rising to between three and three and a half metres, gives a sense of the scale of what once existed here, while the other three walls barely reach head height. The western doorway, which once had a squared opening with slightly splayed sides and two lintel stones meeting almost centrally overhead, is now reduced to its base alone. What the ruin cannot quite conceal is its setting: a graveyard north of Ballynakill village in Connemara, with a castle sitting roughly 175 metres to the south-south-east.

When the scholar and topographer John O'Donovan visited in 1838, he recorded the church in some detail, noting the positions of windows marked by gaps in each gable and along the north and south walls. His description was later reproduced in O'Flanagan's 1927 compilation of Ordnance Survey correspondence. By that point the building was already long ruinous, its roughly worked coursed limestone walls mortared and, on the south wall's inner face, rendered with plaster. Burials within the enclosure and an 18th-century vault in the interior confirm the site remained in use as a place of burial long after the church itself fell out of use. A bullaun stone, one of those hollowed boulders associated with early ecclesiastical sites and sometimes used for grinding or ritual purposes, was once noted on the grass verge to the west of the church. It has since been relocated and now sits outside St Joseph's Roman Catholic church in Ballynakill village.