What sets it apart is not its scale but its detail, and the strange mixture of survival and loss that gives the building its present character. The tracery of the east window, for instance, was broken out in the nineteenth century and burned to make lime, a blunt rural practicality that removed one of the most decorative features of the building. A sheela-na-gig, a carved female figure of a type found on Irish and Scottish medieval churches and castles and thought by some scholars to have an apotropaic function, was also removed from the church and is now held in the National Museum of Ireland.

The building appears to have been constructed in three distinct phases, with the side walls and the lower section of the east gable belonging to the earliest work, dated on architectural grounds to the fourteenth century. The upper east gable, including the large window opening, was added later, and the parapets later still, probably in the fifteenth century. The south wall retains a remarkable sedilia, a set of three stone seats used by clergy during Mass, each niche framed by a moulded pointed arch; the easternmost pinnacle above it is particularly well preserved, decorated with crockets and expanding into a tracery motif of a quatrefoil over two trefoils. Nearby, a cusped ogee-headed piscina, a shallow stone basin used for rinsing liturgical vessels, survives with a scalloped bowl and ogee hood-moulding. A round-headed niche in the north wall, now reduced to its voussoirs, was likely a tomb niche for a significant benefactor. Projecting semi-circular stones near the east gable, each with a hole through the centre, are thought to have carried bell ropes through the roof structure. At the west end, a four-storey residential tower was integrated into the fabric of the church; only its east wall survives, but evidence of a vault over the first floor and corbels for upper timber floors can still be read in the masonry. One coping stone reused in the west gable carries fluted decoration, and a fragment of the same carved stone has ended up in a now-collapsed gate pier on the opposite side of the road, a small sign of how building material here has been quietly redistributed across the centuries. The church's appearance in an 1849 to 1851 publication by Prim provides a useful record of features, including the western pinnacles, that have since deteriorated.