So thoroughly has the vegetation claimed the building that any close examination of the masonry is effectively impossible, save for one exposed angle at the south-east corner where small rubble stonework briefly breaks through the growth. At the centre of a roughly D-shaped graveyard, the ruin retains only its east and south walls standing to any meaningful height, along with a single plain rectangular window cut into the south wall of the nave, just west of where the chancel arch once divided the interior. Whether that internal division is original to the medieval build or was added later, when the inside of the church was converted to use for burials after 1700, remains an open question.

The chapel was known as the church of Emper, or Imper, and sat within the medieval townland of Conlanstown, though the land is today called Churchtown. It appears in the Ecclesiastical Taxation of 1302 to 1306, which placed it within the Deanery of Lough Sewdy and valued it at 4 marks, with an annual tax liability of 5 shillings and 4 pence. By 1540, the tithes of Emper had become part of the assessed holdings of the Augustinian priory of Tristernagh, a house of canons regular whose remains survive several kilometres away. The mid-seventeenth-century Down Survey, which mapped Irish land ownership in extraordinary detail following the Cromwellian conquest, depicted the church as a building with glebe land, the small plot of farmland traditionally attached to a parish living, and the accompanying terrier, a written description of the map, refers simply to "one Chapell in Conlanstowne." The curving boundary of the graveyard wall raises the possibility that an even earlier ecclesiastical enclosure preceded the medieval structure, a pattern found at many Irish sites where Christian use built on much older sacred ground. The medieval parish church of Kilmacnevan lies 3.5 kilometres to the south-east, suggesting Emper functioned as a dependent chapel rather than a parish centre in its own right.