It is an odd, quietly unsettling detail on an otherwise conventional rural church, and most visitors pass beneath it without a second glance. But the mask is far from the strangest thing about this building.

The church was built around 1830, in the years immediately following Catholic Emancipation, when newly enfranchised communities across Ireland began constructing permanent places of worship at a pace and scale not previously possible. The T-plan form, roughcast rendered walls relieved by tooled limestone details, the bellcote, the Y-tracery windows, the moulded kneelers to the gables; all of these were characteristic of the modest, practical Gothic Revival idiom widely adopted for rural Catholic churches of that period. A shallow apse with a catslide roof, that is, a roof that continues down at a lower pitch beyond the main eaves line, was added around 1920, along with a two-bay sacristy. Inside, a carved timber gallery with ogee-headed openings forms an internal porch, and the altar furniture is marble. Outside the main doorway stands a freestanding octagonal holy water font in tooled limestone. What lifts the building well beyond its type, however, are the stained-glass windows in the apse and on the east wall of the transept. These are signed works by Harry Clarke, the Dublin-born artist whose luminous, densely detailed glass, drawing on Art Nouveau and Symbolist influences, is among the most distinctive produced in Ireland in the early twentieth century. Clarke's presence in a small rural church in east Galway is unexpected, and his work here has been noted in scholarly literature on his output.

The church sits within a graveyard containing grave markers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the ruins of a late medieval church occupy the same ground, lending the enclosure several distinct layers of history compressed into one modest site. A rubble limestone boundary wall with numerous stiles surrounds the whole, set with tooled limestone cross devices where the railings meet the wall.