When surveyors first examined the ruins in November 1983, the building was almost entirely smothered in vegetation. Beneath it, enough survived to identify a rectangular medieval parish church, oriented east to west, measuring roughly 17.5 metres long and 7.7 metres wide, with a pointed arch doorway near the western end of the south wall. The west gable and parts of both long walls still stood to their full height. The east gable, however, was already gone, along with a gothic window that earlier observers had recorded there.

The church almost certainly replaced something older. According to nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey correspondence, it was probably built by the Burkes, the powerful Connacht family who were among the most prominent Norman lords in the west of Ireland, sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Crucially, they appear to have built on the footprint of an earlier Irish church, one dedicated to St Meldan of Loch Oirb, suggesting continuous religious use of the site across very different eras. Around 1990, the church and its surrounding graveyard were subjected to a cleaning scheme that included the removal of all that ivy and some excavation of the ground. The work uncovered a robbed window, its stonework long since taken away for use elsewhere, near the eastern end of the south wall. Then, early in 1991, the west gable collapsed. The very wall that had survived for centuries, and that the ivy had held, more or less, in place, was gone within months of the intervention.

The graveyard itself sits in a subrectangular enclosure on the northern slope of a low hill, and a curving section of the boundary wall to the east of the church may preserve the arc of a much older ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that typically surrounds early Irish monastic or church sites. If so, the ground here carries layers of use reaching back well before the Burkes ever arrived in Connacht.