That description, recorded in Brady's 1863 volume, could serve just as well today. The old parish church of Carrigrohane Beg in County Cork survives in a state of gentle, incremental collapse, its east gable still standing to near full height but smothered in ivy, its other walls largely reduced to low mounds beneath the turf.

The church was a modest rectangular structure, measuring roughly eleven metres east to west and just under six metres north to south internally, dimensions that suggest a plain rural parish church rather than anything of great civic ambition. What survives in any legible form is concentrated at the east end: the gable itself, short returns of both the north and south walls, and a lintelled window embrasure positioned at the centre of the east wall. A lintelled embrasure is simply a window opening spanned by a flat horizontal stone rather than an arch, and this one retains a single flat-headed light with a chamfered, or angled, outer edge. The chamfering is a small but telling detail, suggesting a degree of deliberate finish in a building that is otherwise thoroughly ruined. The south wall survives only as a broken edge, but even there the side of the same window embrasure is just visible.

The interior tells its own quiet story. The eastern end has accumulated roughly three quarters of a metre of gravel and earth over the centuries, while the rest of the floor remains relatively level. Rows of low, uninscribed grave markers occupy the space, unmarked stones that record burials without naming anyone. The church sits at the northern end of a graveyard that has continued in use long after the building itself ceased to function, which is a common enough arrangement in Ireland but no less affecting for that.