The floors are gone, the roof is gone, and two doorways in the south and west walls have been blocked up. It is an odd thing to encounter among the headstones, and its oddness turns out to have a history behind it.

The tower, which appears to date no earlier than the eighteenth century, was according to the scholar Power, writing in 1923, probably added in comparatively recent times to an older church. That older church was the parish church of Killaspugmullane, a name that suggests an early ecclesiastical dedication, though no trace of it remains visible at ground level today. The church was still in repair in 1615, but by 1700 a contemporary description recorded it as about 46 foot long and 17 foot broad, with half the walls already down. By 1829 it had fallen entirely out of use. The graveyard itself, a roughly forty-metre square enclosed by a stone wall, continued in occasional use, and the eighteen-century headstones that survive include seven chest tombs, a box-like form common to the period, some of them finely carved. What emerged, over the span of a century or two, was a site where the church dissolved into the ground while a peculiar tower, stripped of its east wall and capped with a small pyramid, was left standing in its place.