The building's modest dimensions, eleven feet wide and with side walls standing nine feet high, suggest it was never a parish church in any conventional sense, more likely a private chapel attached to a particular place or person, and that intimacy makes the children's graveyard beside it feel all the more singular.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, gathered together the scattered documentary references to this site, which appears in records under several spellings: Ballyellynan in 1452, Capella Mineta in 1410 and 1418, and Ballyalynan in 1600. The dedication is to a figure called Beinid, possibly a rendering of Benedict, and Westropp noted that the site was also known as Templebeinid. In 1670, under the Act of Settlement, the land here along with the nearby townland of Dourlas was granted to a Robert Dawges. By 1840, when a local observer recorded the ruins in detail for the Ordnance Survey Letters, the east gable still held its window, round-arched on the outside and constructed of chiselled brown stone, though ivy had grown across it on the inside. The walls themselves were built from small rounded limestone rubble bound with lime and sand mortar, the standard vernacular technique for modest ecclesiastical buildings of the medieval period in this part of Munster. The same survey noted a well about thirty yards to the southwest, called Tobar Beinid, which Westropp was careful to distinguish from a misidentification on the Ordnance Survey map, where it had been labelled Bernard's Well.

The ruin lies to the east of a nearby castle, and both the church and the well carry the same monument record numbers in the national archaeological inventory, suggesting they are understood as a related complex rather than isolated features. The well, a short walk from the gable, is the kind of site easily missed unless you know to look for it. The ivy noted in 1840 may well still be present, and the stonework, particularly the surviving chiselled brown stone of the window, rewards a close look. The children's burial ground associated with the site belongs to a wider tradition of such enclosures in Ireland, sometimes called cillíní, places set aside for those who, for various reasons, could not be interred in consecrated ground; their presence here adds a layer of social history that the bare masonry alone does not convey.