The walls of both nave and chancel mostly survive to full height, which is unusual enough, but the real curiosity lies in what those walls reveal about the building's layered past. A faint, unfaced scar on the interior of the south wall marks where the original east end of the nave once stood, a ghostly seam that shows the chancel was added later, butting up against an already-standing church rather than being built as part of a single design.

The older of the two sections, the nave, contains the core of a Romanesque church, a style characterised by rounded arches and richly decorated doorways, which scholar Tadhg O'Keeffe has dated to around 1150 to 1160 AD. The west doorway, now assembled from re-used fragments set into later jambs and scattered across the graveyard, would originally have had three orders, meaning three successive receding arches framing the entrance. The church appears in the Papal Taxation lists of 1291, indicating it was a functioning parish at that point, and was still reported as being in repair in 1615. By 1694, however, it had been abandoned. The chancel, added in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, is the more architecturally elaborate of the two sections: its east wall carries a twin ogee-headed window under a stepped hood moulding, though the embrasure is now completely blocked, partly by stonework and partly by the Massy tomb of 1771 built up against it on the inside. A carved sandstone head protrudes from the external face of the east gable. A beam slot above a finely carved limestone corbel may once have supported a rood screen, the timber partition that divided nave from chancel in medieval churches. During conservation work carried out in 1993 and 1994, workers found a bullaun stone in the rubble inside the chancel. A bullaun is a rounded hollow worn or carved into a larger stone, often associated with early ecclesiastical sites and sometimes believed to have ritual or curative significance.

The site sits within a broader early ecclesiastical enclosure, and the graveyard remains in use, so the church stands in a landscape that has been continuously sacred for close to a millennium. The east gable, once heavily overgrown, was cleared in the late 1980s, and the consolidation work of the early 1990s means the walls are relatively stable. Details worth seeking out include the holy water stoup set into the east jamb of the now-ruinous chancel doorway, and the carved head on the exterior of the gable, easily missed if attention stays at ground level.