It was already described as ruinous in 1615, and when observers came back to check nearly a century later, in 1700, nothing had changed. The building had simply been left to its own devices, accumulating ivy and quietly subsiding, while the graveyard around it continued to receive the dead. The earliest legible headstone inside dates to 1792, meaning generations of parishioners were buried within walls that had already been derelict for the better part of two centuries.

The fabric of the church rewards closer attention. The rectangular structure measures roughly 26 metres east to west and under 7 metres north to south, and its walls still stand close to their original height, which is unusual for a building so long abandoned. The windows are where the architectural interest concentrates. Most are badly ruined, but the west gable retains a window with a single ogee-headed light, and the east gable has a double ogee-headed light beneath a hood moulding. An ogee arch curves concavely at its base before sweeping to a point, a decorative form associated with late medieval craftsmanship, and its survival here in even partial form hints at what the church once looked like. Writing in 1913, a commentator named Brunicardi proposed that the original entrance, now patched with cement and set slightly off-centre in the south wall, had a pointed arch, and that one of the south wall windows originally held a single pointed light. The south-east corner is close to collapse, and the building as a whole has an air of holding on rather than recovering.

In 1995 Cork County Council stripped the ivy and repaired and repointed the walls, which explains why the structure has not progressed further into rubble since. The church sits near the south-west corner of the graveyard at Coolduff, and the interior, still open to the sky, remains densely covered with grave markers accumulated over the past two and a half centuries or more.