The west gable still stands close to its original height, carrying with it 10.8 metres of the north wall, and together they preserve details that most ruins of this age have long since lost: a central doorway with a semi-circular arch and slightly inclined jambs, framed on its outer face by a shallow architrave that rises to a cap-like crown over the keystone. Someone at some point inserted a lintel across the top of the jambs and filled in the area above it, a repair that left its own marks in the masonry. Projecting from either end of the west wall are antae, narrow extensions of the gable beyond the line of the side walls, a distinctively Irish feature of early medieval church architecture. The northern antae survives intact; only the base of the southern one remains. The rest of the walls have fallen entirely, and ivy has claimed much of what stands.

Scholars have puzzled over the church's date without quite agreeing. Peter Harbison placed it broadly in the twelfth or thirteenth century, while Rolf Loeber's collaborator Avril Johnson proposed a tighter range of around 1110 to 1120, putting it in the earlier phases of Hiberno-Romanesque building in Munster. Harold Leask, writing on Irish churches, drew a comparison with the nearby Coole church and suggested the two buildings might be the work of the same mason, a detail that raises the appealing possibility of a single craftsman moving between parishes in early twelfth-century Cork, leaving his particular handling of arch and antae at each site. By 1615, Britway was already recorded as a ruin, meaning the church had been abandoned or fallen out of use long before the more dramatic disruptions of the later seventeenth century. George Petrie illustrated the west doorway in 1845, and a photograph by Currey published in 1894 recorded the round-headed window set into the north wall, 6.9 metres from the north-west corner on the interior face, suggesting the walls were already drawing antiquarian attention well before any formal survey.