The building, known locally as the Orchard Church, or Ullord Church in Irish, is constructed of roughly squared limestone blocks with a heavily mortared rubble core, but the sea has been dismantling it steadily for centuries. By April 2014, most of the southern wall had been reduced to a single course of masonry after heavy storms, and only a two-metre stretch of the western gable remained standing with its outer facing largely stripped away. Perhaps the most arresting detail of the inspection that year was the interior itself: a storm surge had deposited a rocky storm beach inside the nave, with loose building stones from the church scattered among the wave-driven rubble just outside to the south. The only wall still surviving for its full length is the northern one, and it carries a carved date of 1617, set high on the outside face in one of the larger stones.

That date of 1617 places the church, at least in its recorded or reconstructed form, in the early seventeenth century, though the presence of what may be the earthwork remains of an ecclesiastical enclosure, a roughly curving arc of bank about ten metres to the east, hints at an older religious site beneath or around it. Ecclesiastical enclosures of this kind, typically a raised or banked boundary marking off sacred ground, are a common feature of early medieval Irish church sites, and their survival, even in fragmentary form, often suggests continuity of use across many centuries. A shell midden, a layered deposit of discarded shellfish remains indicating repeated human activity, stretches approximately ten metres from the western gable, pointing to a long history of settlement or subsistence use on this exposed shore. About 230 metres to the south-east lies a children's burial ground, a type of site known in Ireland as a cillín, where unbaptised infants were traditionally interred in unconsecrated ground close to, but apart from, the main community cemetery. In May 2019, exposed burials were noted near the north-western corner of the church itself, a reminder that the erosion is not only architectural.