And yet that scrap of standing masonry is enough to read the place. The church measured roughly 19.5 metres east to west and 9 metres north to south, its walls a metre thick and built from roughly coursed limestone rubble, the kind of construction common across the Irish midlands during the medieval period. The sole surviving architectural detail is one splay of a window, set at the centre of the west wall. A splay is an angled reveal cut into thick masonry to widen the opening on the interior, allowing more light into what would otherwise have been a dim stone interior. That single angled surface is now the most eloquent thing left standing.

The church sits on elevated ground in gently rolling countryside, positioned at the centre of a large graveyard whose headstones date mostly to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting a community continued to bury its dead here long after the building itself fell into ruin. To the south, a tower house stands in close proximity to the church. Tower houses were fortified residential structures, typically built by local lords and landowners between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the one at Cullenwaine may be broadly contemporary with the church. The spatial relationship between the two, with possible evidence of medieval settlement in the ground between them, suggests this was once a more substantial place than it now appears, a focal point of local life rather than an isolated ruin on a hill.