It sits at the south-eastern edge of a gently sloping hillside, with the land dropping away sharply to the south and south-east, and it has been a ruin for well over a century, quietly outlasted by the congregation that once used it.

The church was built in 1736 as a Church of Ireland parish church and served a very particular community: the Wingfield family, who held the title Viscounts Powerscourt, along with their estate workers, household staff, and a scattering of local Protestant families. It was, in other words, a church shaped entirely by the social geography of a great landed estate, its congregation defined as much by employment and deference as by faith. By sometime before 1908 it had fallen into ruin, and a replacement parish church was built at around that time, positioned opposite the main entrance to the estate itself. The old building was simply left where it stood, its associated graveyard remaining as the clearest evidence of its former purpose.

The graveyard is worth seeking out for anyone already exploring the demesne. The ruins mark a place where the internal life of a Georgian estate, its hierarchies and its Protestantism, took physical form in stone, and where that form has since quietly collapsed back into the landscape.