A square tower rises from a pointed doorway, steps up into an embattled octagonal stage, and then tapers into a spire, all flanked by low gabled projections and detailed with finely carved stonework. The nave itself is more restrained, lit by wide pointed window openings with Y-tracery (a Gothic glazing pattern in which the mullion forks into two curved branches near the top) and divided externally by slender buttresses. Inside, the fittings are largely gone, but a carved wooden gallery survives at the western end, along with memorial plaques on the walls. Whether the roof was ever sheathed in copper, as one early twentieth-century source suggested, is unclear; it now carries slate over A-framed timber supports.

The church was built in 1812 on the site of an earlier parish church of Litter, and the elaborate western entrance front represents improvements carried out that same year by G. R. Pain, the Cork-based architect known for a number of Gothic Revival and ecclesiastical works across Munster. As early as 1750, a writer named Smith noted a parish church here in good repair, and by 1837 Lewis was describing the rebuilt structure as handsome, with its tower and spire already a local landmark. By 1842, however, the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the building in an L-shaped plan, with the east end of the nave already roofless, suggesting that deterioration had set in not long after construction. The site sits within the northern edge of the Castle Hyde demesne, and may also be one of the possible locations of the medieval parish church of Litter, though this remains unconfirmed.

The church stands in the southern half of a graveyard, reached by a beech-lined walk through the gardens of Castle Hyde house. The approach through that formal avenue gives the ruins a slightly formal quality, set apart from the surrounding landscape rather than stumbled upon.