The building has long since collapsed or been robbed of its fabric, but scattered pieces of cut stone still lie among the graves, quiet evidence of what once stood here. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 recorded the structure as a rectangular building oriented on a roughly south-west to north-east axis, which is a modest departure from the more conventional east-west alignment seen in many Irish parish churches.

This was Cahiralton parish church, and a record from 1615 notes that it was then still in repair, placing it among the functioning rural churches of early seventeenth-century Munster at a time when many such buildings were already falling into disuse or disrepair following the upheavals of the preceding decades. The name Cahiralton reflects older Gaelic place-name layers that often survive only in ecclesiastical or administrative records from this period. By the time the first detailed Ordnance Survey mapping was carried out in the 1830s and 1840s, the building had clearly declined to a ruin, captured on paper as a simple rectangular outline before even that faded from the ground.