What makes the ruin quietly odd is the arrangement of its doorways: opposed openings appear in both walls to the east of the west gable, one blocked and spanned by a flat masonry arch, the other by a pointed arch. The raised ground beneath the building is a further detail worth noting, as such elevation often indicates long use as a burial site, and the interior has indeed seen interment.

The chapel's documentary trail reaches back to 1275, when a church record known as the Crede Mihi listed the chapel at Artaine as one of three attached to the Church of Finglas. By 1532 Archbishop Alen's Reportorium viride, a survey of ecclesiastical properties, identified the building as a chapel dedicated to St Nicholas. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 still noted its existence, suggesting the structure retained some presence well into the seventeenth century. Archaeological investigations carried out in 1982 found sandstone jambs in the west and south walls dating from the thirteenth to fourteenth century, and fragments of sixteenth-century floor tiles were recovered from the interior. The walls themselves are built of roughly-coursed calp limestone rubble, calp being the dark, dense limestone common to the Dublin and Meath area and widely used in local medieval construction. Memorials attached to the exterior of the building date from 1711 to 1827, indicating that the site continued to function as a place of commemoration long after the chapel itself fell out of use.

The remains sit within a small public park in Artane, on the northside of the city. The raised platform on which the building stands is visible on approach and gives a sense of the site's age before you reach the walls themselves. The opposed doorways and the contrast between the blocked flat arch and the open pointed arch reward a closer look, as does the exterior masonry where the memorials are fixed. The sandstone jambs identified in 1982 are a detail to look for if the stonework is accessible. The site is unenclosed and publicly accessible.