What makes the site particularly striking is not just its state of survival but the accidental biography it carries, from Papal Annates to a vanished wooden gallery, from a dynastic burial ground to a broken stone whose inscription was already half lost before anyone thought to record it.

The church appears in Papal Annates from 1433, with further entries in 1479, 1487, and 1511, and a Royal Visitation of 1615 noted it as being 'up and well'. By 1622 it featured in a diocesan list of parochial churches, and in 1633 its minister was one Willmus Lane, who simultaneously held the living at a place recorded as 'Dunlo'. The building measures 21.35 metres by 7.2 metres internally, with rubble walls set in lime and sand mortar surviving to an average height of 3.8 metres. The east gable retains a tall, narrow, round-headed window with splayed ingoings, and similar windows appear near the east end of both side-walls. A pointed doorway in the south wall still has its drawbar sockets intact, the hardware of a door long gone. Beam-holes near the west end of the north and south walls, together with a slight offset up the west gable, suggest that a timber loft or gallery once occupied that end of the building. The graveyard serves as the burial place of the Macgillycuddy's of the Reeks, a branch of the O'Sullivan Mores connected with nearby Dromaloughane castle.

An ogham stone, ogham being an early medieval script using notched lines along a stone's edge to represent letters, is associated with this site, though its precise original location is disputed. Scholars John Rhys and R.A.S. Macalister both cited an earlier source, a certain Graves, when recording the stone: Rhys placed it in a churchyard 'near Killorglin', while Macalister was more specific, noting it had been 'standing in the churchyard at Knockane'. The stone, now held at the National Museum of Ireland under the reference 1885:432, measures 1.15 metres long but has been split lengthwise, destroying the opening of its inscription. Macalister read what remained along the sinister angle, the left edge when facing the inscription, as MAQI RECTA, a partial formula typical of early Irish memorial stones. A cross-inscribed stone from the neighbouring townland of Killoughane was incorporated into the graveyard boundary wall in the late 1980s, adding one more layer of reuse to a place that has been accumulating them for the better part of six centuries.