It explains itself, in Latin and in English, to anyone who stops to read it. The inscription records that the church, known historically as Temple-Michael or Mourne Abbey, had long stood in ruins before being rebuilt in 1717, during the third year of the reign of King George I. The final line drops into English with a directness that feels almost jarring after the formal Latin: "Fear God, honor the King." It is a small window into the priorities of the established church in early eighteenth-century Ireland, where loyalty to the Crown and loyalty to God were presented as effectively the same obligation.

The building that replaced the older ruin is a Church of Ireland parish church, no longer used for religious worship but still structurally intact, sitting in a graveyard just west of the village centre. It was constructed on the footprint of an earlier church, the history of which was already being documented by the writer Charles Smith by 1750. Architecturally it is modest but coherent: a rectangular nave roughly thirteen metres long and eight metres wide, with a three-stage pinnacled tower at the west end and a shallow semicircular apse at the east. Inside, the ceiling is a barrel vault, the curved, tunnel-like plastered form common to ecclesiastical buildings of this period, and light enters through round-headed windows fitted with two-light wooden frames in both the north and south walls, with a matching window in the apse. The overall effect is plain and unfussy, which makes the inscribed plaque outside all the more striking by contrast.

The church sits within its graveyard on the western edge of Ballynamona, and the tower and apse are visible from the road. The plaque above the west door, noted by the scholar Fitzgerald in a publication from around 1917 to 1920, repays close attention; the Latin text and its blunt English coda together capture something of the political atmosphere in which the building was raised.