It is a quietly unsettling thing to find: a baptismal font, the object that once marked entry into Christian life, now marking the threshold of a church that has long since ceased to function. The walls around it survive only to between one and one and a half metres in height, their clay bonding exposed, their quoins uncut, the whole shell enclosed within an earthen-banked graveyard on a north-facing slope above a stream valley in County Wexford.

The church was dedicated to St Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century bishop from what is now Turkey whose reputation for generosity provided the historical foundation for the figure of Santa Claus. His feast day falls on the 6th of December, and that date had particular local significance here: a holy well associated with the saint lies in a ravine about 130 metres to the south-east, on the far side of the stream, and patterns, the traditional Irish practice of devotional gathering at a sacred site on a saint's feast day, may have been held there on that date. The church itself can be traced in the documentary record to 1404, when it was granted to St Selskar's Abbey in Wexford town. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, conducted a visitation of churches in the diocese, the building had become impropriate to Henry Wallop, meaning its revenues were diverted to a lay landowner rather than supporting a resident priest. Whether a priest was serving the parish at all at that point, Ram's record does not say, and the condition of the building at the time goes unmentioned.

The ruined church occupies a rectangular graveyard of roughly 55 metres by 50 metres, still defined by its earthen banks. The interior of the church measures just over 13 metres east to west and 6 metres north to south, undivided, with a narrow entrance in the north wall towards the western end and a corresponding area of collapse in the south wall opposite it. The font, just inside that north entrance, is easy to miss precisely because it is so close to being reclaimed by the earth around it.