The eastern gable had already fallen before anyone thought to record it in 1840, and the north wall went with it. What remains is the west gable, its semi-circular doorway of finely chiselled sandstone still intact, inclined jambs tapering slightly toward the arch, no moulding or keystone, just the plain confidence of early Romanesque work. Inside, against that same west wall, someone at a later date added an arcade of three round-arched recesses, a decorative interior feature whose arches are slightly more pointed than the original doorway arch, suggesting a different hand and a different century. And somewhere within those walls, according to local folklore recorded in the Schools' Collection, an ogham stone, one of the early medieval inscribed standing stones used to mark lineage or territory, was built directly into the fabric of the pre-Norman structure. Nobody has located it.

The church is the old parish church of Clonelty, and its name carries a small piece of landscape history. As recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840, Clonelty derives from the Irish "Cluain eilte," meaning "plain of the doe," the townland itself named for the low-lying, meadow-like ground on which it sits. The church is possibly dedicated to St. Ita, or Íde, of Killeedy, a seventh-century saint of considerable local importance in this part of Munster. The site appears to have been enclosed within a multi-vallate Early Christian enclosure, meaning a settlement defined by multiple concentric banks or ditches, a form common to ecclesiastical and high-status sites of the early medieval period. By 1201 the parish is referred to in the record as "Cluonelti," and over the following century it passed through the hands of Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical figures: granted by Bishop Robert to Hugh and Ismay de Possewyk in 1254, and later transferred to Bishop Gerald by Adam Flaundrens between 1275 and 1280. After the Reformation it was adapted for Protestant worship, though it was never divided into nave and chancel. Nineteenth-century drawings by William F. Wakeman recorded carved stone capitals decorated with human faces at the corners, a characteristic Romanesque detail; those capitals have since disappeared and their whereabouts are unknown.

The ruin sits on a slightly raised area in the north-east quadrant of the graveyard, built of roughly coursed sandstone blocks, many dressed with diagonal tooling. The west gable, though its upper section was at some point rebuilt in smaller rubble stone, still carries the doorway that John O'Donovan sketched for the Ordnance Survey in 1840, describing it as "a very curious specimen of ancient architecture and well worthy of preservation." A stone water font once stood just inside that doorway; the landowner has noted it has since been removed and its location is no longer known. The south wall retains a single surviving window near the east end, splayed on the inside and flat-headed, its outer face of limestone set high in the wall. A fragment of wall extends from the west end of the south wall, thought to be the remnant of a lateral structure.