When the parish church of Kilmurry was rebuilt in 1847, it was placed roughly 450 metres west of the earlier church site, breaking with the older ground entirely. That kind of relocation was not unusual in nineteenth-century ecclesiastical building, but it gives the Coolduff church a particular quality: its modest presence on this spot is the result of a conscious decision, not simple continuity.

The building is compact, measuring twelve metres east to west and eight metres north to south, with a slate roof and a bellcote sitting atop the west gable. A bellcote is a small open framework, often stone or timber, designed to hold one or two bells without requiring a full tower, a practical solution on a building of this scale. Four narrow round-headed windows pierce both the north and south walls, with three more in the east wall, giving the interior a careful, even distribution of light. The entrance is through a plain rounded arch in the west wall. Modest as all this sounds, the interior was considered worth improving: sometime in the 1880s it was remodelled at the expense of A.R. Warren of Warrenscourt, a detail recorded by Cole in 1903 that places the church within the wider social world of a local landowning family. The surrounding churchyard contains inscribed headstones dating from the 1890s, contemporaneous with that remodelling, and giving the site much of its legible human history.