Two companion carvings once kept it company: a king wearing a foliate crown and a woman with an elaborate headdress. Both are now gone, documented only in photographs taken while they were still in place. The lone survivor, its helmet drawn down over the ears and the sides of the face, remains where it was set, quietly anomalous in a building that already rewards close attention.

The church was built in two distinct phases. The first dates to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century and accounts for most of what still stands: the walls of erratically coursed limestone, the pointed south doorway with its keel moulding and hood moulding, an incised consecration cross on the west jamb, a holy water stoup in the east ingoing, and a single lancet window in the east gable. Embedded in the inner face of the wall just above the doorway is a fragment of a rotary quern, a hand-powered grinding stone, worked into the fabric of the building in a way that suggests deliberate reuse rather than accident. The second phase came in the fifteenth century, when the church was altered to incorporate defensive features more typical of a fortified tower than a place of worship. A machicolation, a projecting parapet with floor openings through which objects could be dropped on attackers below, was added at the northwest corner, along with a wall-walk and drain-holes. Conservation work in 2017 revealed steps running between the machicoulis and the gable ridge, connecting an inner and outer gable to form a continuous wall-walk overhead. Vestiges of what may have been a high defensive wall can still be made out near the western boundary. Four corbels in the west wall indicate that an upper floor once existed, and traces of a belfry above the west wall were recorded in the early 1990s. A font bowl with a grotesque carved head was noted near the altar as recently as 1992; it has since disappeared. Two pieces from a set of medieval amulets known as the 'Nine Irons' were also recovered here, objects that sit at the intersection of devotional practice and folk belief in ways that are not fully understood.

The church sits immediately west of a steep slope, so the approach from that direction gives a sudden and fairly complete view of the surviving walls, which still stand to between four and four point two metres in height. The south wall, facing into the valley, retains two windows with round-arched embrasures, the easternmost of which has an ogee head with decorated spandrels, a detail worth examining closely alongside the doorway's surviving mouldings. The remaining carved head is at the east end of the north wall's interior face.