The two structures are connected by a single-storey porch, a quietly awkward architectural handshake that tells you something unusual is going on. The tower was never demolished when the new church went up in 1816; it simply stayed, absorbed, and is now a National Monument in state care.

The Board of First Fruits, an ecclesiastical body that funded the construction of Church of Ireland churches across Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, raised the present building on the footprint of the older medieval parish church it replaced. That earlier structure was recorded by the antiquarian Austin Cooper in the late eighteenth century, who described it as a formidable building with a nave containing arched recesses on either side and a smaller chancel beyond. A carved head still visible below the east window of the current church is almost certainly the same one Cooper noted near the east window of the medieval building. The surviving tower, residential rather than purely defensive in function, is square in plan with walls averaging 1.2 metres thick. A round turret at its north-west corner houses the stair, and the interior retains a stone vault over the ground floor. The first floor is lit by an ogee-headed double-light window, a graceful pointed arch form common in late medieval Irish stonework, whose southern terminal ends in a carved bearded figure. A scar-line on the outer face of the tower's east wall marks where the roof of the vanished medieval church once met the masonry. During refurbishment works in 1999, archaeologists monitoring the site uncovered part of a medieval burial ground just south of the church's south-west corner; pottery sherds from the burials pointed to a thirteenth or fourteenth-century date.

The site sits in a graveyard on Balrothery's green, which makes it straightforward to find and easy to approach on foot. Access to the tower itself is through the west end of the building, now housing the Balrothery Heritage Centre, via the connecting porch. A separate tower house stands roughly thirty metres to the south, so the immediate area rewards a slow circuit rather than a single glance. The carved bearded figure on the first-floor window and the roof scar on the tower's east face are the two details most worth pausing over.