The nave and chancel are not of one build; the chancel is a later addition, extended onto an already-standing structure, and the whole thing was reportedly in ruins by 1615, then apparently repaired, then destroyed again during the wars of 1641. What you see now is a building that outlived itself at least twice.

The church served the parish of Ballyoughtera and, according to the nineteenth-century topographer Samuel Lewis, was built in 1549. Its survival into the seventeenth century was evidently incomplete and intermittent. The fabric itself preserves small forensic details: traces of wicker-centring survive in the vault over the doorway in the south wall of the nave. Wicker-centring was a medieval construction technique in which a woven framework of wicker was used as temporary support while a stone arch or vault was being built; the wicker has long since gone, but the impression it left in the masonry remains. The top of the west gable has been levelled, suggesting it once carried a bell cote, a small masonry structure designed to hold one or two bells in place of a full tower. Inside, the floor is crowded with low uninscribed grave markers alongside inscribed headstones, the earliest dated 1798, and several chest tombs, the oldest from 1764. A collapsed vault in the nave belonged to the Bunbury family and is dated 1786. A plain chest tomb dated 1868 marks the burial place of the last Earl of Shannon of Castlemartyr. In the south-east corner of the chancel, a flat slab is said to cover the burial place of the Geraldines of Imokilly, the powerful Fitzgerald sept who once dominated this part of east Cork before their fortunes collapsed in the late sixteenth century.