The building is a Church of Ireland structure dating to after 1700, and the vegetation has won so decisively that researchers have been reduced to reading the ruin by its geometry alone. The east gable wall, measured at 0.75 metres thick, and a blocked-up flat-headed doorway in the centre of the west gable are the two details that allow any dating at all. Without the ivy stripped back, the fabric itself gives almost nothing away. A 1943 survey noted frankly that there was no architectural feature visible which would indicate the date of the building.

What makes the site considerably older than its standing walls is the ground beneath them. The antiquarian Thomas Westropp recorded in 1904 to 1905 that the post-medieval church had been built directly on the site of a medieval parish church. The documentary trail reaches back further still. A charter issued by King John in 1185, and confirmed by Turlough O'Brien in 1200, granted the church of "Cahercornii" to Monasteranenagh Abbey, a Cistercian house founded in County Limerick in the twelfth century. That grant places organised religious activity on this site more than eight centuries before the ivy began its work. The oldest legible tombstone in the surrounding graveyard, a low slab, bears the date 1717, which gives a rough lower boundary for the current graveyard's recorded use, though the ground itself will be older.

The graveyard remains in use, so the site is accessible rather than abandoned. Visitors should expect to see a ruin that is more green mass than recognisable structure, with the underlying stonework only partially visible where the ivy thins. The west gable, where the blocked doorway sits, is worth looking for, as it is one of the few points where the building's original arrangement can be sensed. The rectangular enclosure of the graveyard itself, noted in the record as a defining feature of the site's layout, is easier to read than the church within it.