The building is gone, but the walled enclosure remains, roughly ninety metres east to west and forty metres north to south, defined by masonry and overlooking one of the most significant estuaries on the south coast of Ireland. What makes the site quietly strange is not its ruin but the fate of its smaller pieces: a carved stone head and a small stone effigy that almost certainly originated here have since been moved to Arthurstown village, about five hundred metres to the east, and a granite trough left behind in the graveyard may once have served as a sarcophagus for the effigy itself.

The church was dedicated to St James and served the village of Ballyhack along with its castle, which lies roughly six hundred metres to the northwest. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, carried out a visitation of the diocese, St James was recorded as being impropriate to Dunbrody, meaning its revenues were held by an outside body rather than the local parish clergy, a common arrangement in post-Reformation Ireland. Ram noted, however, that the building was in good repair at that time. The situation had changed considerably by the mid-seventeenth century: the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 recorded it as already in ruins. It was later revived as the Church of Ireland parish church of St James and Dunbrody, and by the time Samuel Lewis described it in 1837 it was a small building, without a tower or steeple, that had been repaired during the 1830s by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. That structure no longer survives.

The graveyard itself remains accessible, enclosed within its masonry walls on the clifftop. The granite trough is still there, an ambiguous object whose possible original function as a sarcophagus gives it an interest that goes beyond its present appearance. Visitors looking for the carved head and effigy will need to continue east to Arthurstown, where both pieces have ended up, separated from the site that most likely produced them.