The building itself is modest in scale, roughly eight and a half metres north to south and just over eighteen metres east to west, but the layers of time compressed into its walls are considerably less modest.

The most telling detail is at the eastern end, where a pair of antae survive from the twelfth century. Antae are projecting side walls that extend slightly beyond the end wall of a church, a feature characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical architecture, in which the side walls were built to carry the weight of a timber or thatched roof. Their presence here points to a Romanesque or pre-Romanesque building tradition. The southern wall carries a later flat-headed doorway, one metre and ten centimetres wide, with interior bar slots still visible, the kind of fittings that would once have held a timber bar drawn across to secure the door from within. This doorway replaced an earlier western entrance, and of that original opening only the threshold stone remains, now held by the National Museum of Ireland. Six gravestones survive inside, set within a gravel-lined interior, evidence that the building continued to serve the local community long after any active liturgical use had ceased. Restoration work has consolidated the remains in recent years, though the ruin retains enough of its original fabric to make the sequence of alterations legible to anyone who takes the time to look closely.