The Ordnance Survey Letters for Athneasy Parish described a side wall roughly six metres long and just over two metres high, already broken near the east end, with a detached corner piece standing apart from it. By 1943, a separate account recorded only a single fragment of the north gable. Whether the walls had continued to fall in the intervening century, or whether different observers were simply describing the same ruin from different angles and with different attention, is not entirely clear.

The settlement here was known by another name entirely not so long ago. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in the early twentieth century and drawing on an earlier source, noted that the place appears to have been called Ballyhyward as late as 1586. The church itself was built in a straightforward rubble style, its walls made from rough, undressed stones set in lime and sand mortar, which was the standard construction method for rural ecclesiastical buildings across medieval Ireland. The Ordnance Survey correspondent, writing around 1840, was struck by the setting as much as the structure: the burial ground, still actively in use at the time, lay within a potato field. The oldest legible tombstone recorded in the graveyard dates to 1765, which gives some sense of the site's continuity as a place of community burial long after the church itself had fallen into disuse.

The graveyard is enclosed by a stone wall, which at least marks out the site clearly in what remains agricultural land. Anyone approaching should expect a modest and quietly melancholy place rather than a substantial ruin; what survives is genuinely fragmentary, and the scholarly record is itself a little uncertain about the precise state of the remains at any given point. The surrounding landscape of south County Limerick is flat and open, and the site's low profile means it can be easy to pass without registering. The detail worth looking for, if the fragment of the east gable corner remains standing, is how two disconnected pieces of wall form a right angle in the open air, the ghost of a building reduced to just enough to suggest its original shape.