The small rectangular building, known in 1840 as Templebeg, meaning "little church" in Irish, may have had a connection to the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century, when that military religious order claimed advowson of the chapel. Advowson was the right to appoint a clergyman to a parish, and its possession by the Templars would place this modest Tipperary ruin within the same network of preceptories and landholdings that the order maintained across Ireland before their suppression in the early fourteenth century.

The church sits at the southern end of a north-south ridge of rock outcrop in gently rolling farmland, with a tower house 350 metres to the north and a moated site and ringfort roughly 430 metres to the east, forming a cluster of monuments that spans many centuries of occupation. The building itself is a simple rectangle, around ten metres east to west and six metres north to south internally, constructed in roughly coursed limestone rubble. A piscina, a shallow stone basin used for rinsing sacred vessels during Mass, survives at the eastern end of the south wall, with a credence shelf above it. The Ordnance Survey letters of 1840 describe the building as lit by four windows and accessed by a doorway in the south wall, and at that time make no mention of any western chamber. That chamber, built to the same wall thickness as the main body of the church, appears to have been added in the nineteenth century, most likely as a burial enclosure, and now contains eighteenth and nineteenth-century memorials. A further group of four large memorials stands at the eastern end of the interior. The remains of a quarry lie immediately to the north of the church, suggesting the limestone used in its construction may have been extracted very close to hand.