The western porch door is now blocked up, but its surround gives away the building's complicated history: the arch stones and jambs are deeply chamfered, and the base and capital on each side appear to be reused material, possibly 18th century, embedded within a structure that was substantially rebuilt long after they were first carved.

The earlier core of the building is thought to date from the early 18th century. By 1837, Samuel Lewis described it as a very neat edifice in the early English style, and noted that it had already undergone repairs by that point. Then, in the late 1890s, the whole structure was remodelled again. A semicircular apse was added at the eastern end of the rectangular nave, and three paired windows with limestone surrounds were inserted into both the north and south walls, replacing what one contemporary account called old plain wooden frames. The effect of all this is a building whose present form reflects at least three distinct phases of construction and taste, from early 18th-century origins through early 19th-century tidying to a near-complete Victorian overhaul. Beneath all of it, the site itself is older still; the church was built on or near the location of an ancient parish church of Moviddy, a settlement whose ecclesiastical roots predate anything visible in the current ruin.