The east gable, still standing close to its full height and thick with ivy, measures 7.7 metres across and gives some sense of the building's original scale, but the walls that once ran west from it have largely gone, reduced in places to a few lower courses of stone. Two lintelled window embrasures survive, one near the east end of the south wall and one at the centre of the east gable itself, though neither retains its original lights. A small wall-press, a shallow recess built into the masonry to hold objects, remains near the south end of the east wall. The church now sits within a graveyard, which is often the way with ruins like this, the dead outlasting the building that once served them.

The site carries a longer history than the ruined parish church alone suggests. In 1541 it was recorded as a cell affiliated to the Cistercian monastery of Abbeymahon, a dependency rather than an independent house, suggesting a modest religious outpost connected to a larger institutional network. The Cistercians, a reforming monastic order that spread through Ireland during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, typically maintained such satellite cells as prayer stations or working farms. By the time the parish church stood here, that monastic connection was long dissolved, but the site retained its sacred character. A survey from 1695 found the building in reasonable repair, though by 1806 it had fallen into bad condition. It was eventually replaced in 1827 by a new church in Skibbereen, the nearby town that had grown to become the more practical centre of parish life, and Abbeystrowry was left to the graveyard and the ivy.