The west wall, surviving to near its full height at around 5.4 metres long, contains a ruined central opening roughly 2.3 metres wide that may once have been a doorway, though its original function is not certain. About five metres to the east, a walled family grave plot, measuring 7.5 by 6.2 metres, sits in a position that may actually overlie the church's east wall, meaning the building's footprint has been quietly absorbed into the burial ground around it.

The church's history is a patchwork of absences and passing references. Parish records from 1649 noted that both Clonpriest and the neighbouring parish of Ardagh had no churches at all. By 1789, Clonpriest at least had acquired one. Writing in 1837, the topographer Samuel Lewis described the building then standing as 'a very old and inconvenient building', adding that there were plans to erect a replacement on a more suitable site. A separate report the same year placed its construction at roughly a century earlier, which would put it somewhere around the 1730s, though the structure Lewis saw may have incorporated older fabric. By 1842, when the first Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were being prepared, the building was already marked as a ruin, a small rectangular outline with that designation attached, suggesting the replacement had been built and the old church abandoned within a fairly short window of time.