The current building is T-shaped, with a nave running roughly northeast to southwest and a shallow chancel at the northeast end. A bellcote sits atop the southeast arm, and the whole structure is built in random-rubble limestone with cut-limestone detailing around the pointed windows and doorways. Nothing about it looks particularly ancient, and that is precisely the point.

When the antiquary John Windele passed through the area around 1831, he found something quite different on this spot: a building he described as a low and rude structure, thatched. His account, later published by Grove White in the early twentieth century, gives a rare glimpse of what rural parish churches in north Cork looked like before the wave of Victorian rebuilding that swept through the Irish countryside. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map confirms there was already a church here at that time, drawn as a rectangular structure on the same northeast to southwest axis but with a central projection to the northwest, a somewhat different arrangement to what stands today. The present building was erected in 1868 and 1869, effectively replacing the older structure while inheriting its site and its general orientation. The T-shaped plan, achieved by adding a transept arm to a conventional nave-and-chancel layout, was a common solution in nineteenth-century Catholic church building in Ireland, allowing larger congregations to gather without requiring the greater expense of a full cruciform design.