The arms of the original T-plan structure are all that survive; the nave, which ran east to west, was removed at some point after the building fell out of use, leaving a rectangular shell that someone found practical enough to convert into storage. The windows tell part of the story: a round-headed opening in the north gable and a more pointed, blocked window in the south gable suggest the original ecclesiastical intention, while the pointed opes in the east and west elevations were altered when the building took on its secular role.

The church itself was not ancient when it was abandoned. Built in the early nineteenth century on the site of an old mill, it replaced an earlier chapel at Shronaphookeen, roughly 1.8 kilometres to the south-west. In 1837, the topographer Samuel Lewis recorded it simply as a commodious modern building, a phrase that suggests it was considered respectable rather than remarkable. By 1904, the Ordnance Survey was marking it as an unnamed ruin, the congregation having moved on in 1903 to a new Catholic church about a hundred metres to the east. That replacement building is still in use and is worth a glance in its own right: a five-bay structure with side aisles, trefoil lights in the clerestory, rusticated stonework, and a bellcote sitting above the west gable. The two buildings, separated by less than a minute's walk, represent two distinct phases of Catholic church-building in rural Cork, one erased almost entirely, the other still functioning.