The east gable of this long rectangular building carries a striking basal plinth, and its small windows sit off-centre in a way that would be unusual for a church. Archaeologists have noted that in its later phases the structure may have functioned as a secular building rather than a place of worship, a quiet puzzle embedded in a site people have been burying their dead in for centuries.

The foundation here goes back to 1260, when a dependent house of the Premonstratensian abbey at Annaghdown was established on what was already an older Celtic monastic site. The Premonstratensians, a contemplative order of canons who followed an austere rule derived from Augustine, built on ground that had long carried religious significance. Excavations carried out by Higgins and McHugh in the late 1980s revealed four distinct phases of construction and use, spanning the 13th to the 17th century. The original 13th-century doorway was located towards the west end of the north wall, but was later superseded by a west doorway, probably in the 15th or 16th century, when the west gable itself appears to have been rebuilt. Later still, in the 17th century, the foundations of what may have been a north transept and an adjoining sacristy were added at roughly the midpoint of the north wall. Two small windows in the surviving fabric at the south-west corner point to a two-storey arrangement at that end. Among the finds from the dig were medieval querns, the hand-grinding stones used for processing grain, and a number of graveslabs. The building itself measures roughly 28.4 metres in length and sits along the north side of the present graveyard, which may itself occupy the footprint of a much earlier ecclesiastical enclosure.

The surviving fabric is fragmentary: the east gable, a stretch of north wall, and a fragment at the south-east corner are the portions that still reach full height. The off-centre window in the east gable and the plinth beneath it are worth looking at carefully, since they carry most of the visual evidence for the building's puzzling later identity, somewhere between sacred and secular, neither one thing nor the other by the end of its working life.