Yet what survives is precise and telling. The east wall is gabled and still holds a single-light round-headed limestone window set within a round-headed embrasure, a form consistent with Romanesque work of the twelfth century, when Irish builders were absorbing continental architectural ideas and applying them to modest rural churches like this one.

The building was probably constructed in the twelfth century and in time became a chapel-of-ease, a secondary church serving a scattered rural population who lived too far from the main parish church to attend it regularly, in this case the parish of St Peter's in Athlone. The ruins sit at the northern corner of a rectangular graveyard defined by masonry walls and measuring roughly twenty-five metres by twenty. The Cross river runs about seventy metres to the south. Close by, cut into bedrock about twenty metres south-west of the graveyard, there was once a bullaun stone, a shallow basin hollowed from rock that in early medieval Ireland was associated with ritual or liturgical use. It is no longer visible at ground level. St Bridget's well lies approximately one hundred and ninety metres to the north-east, one of countless holy wells across Ireland that often mark the edges of early ecclesiastical landscapes and suggest a longer devotional history than the surviving stonework alone can tell.