That kind of consolidated, personal act of founding is unusual even by the standards of nineteenth-century Church of Ireland patronage, and the building he left behind repays attention for reasons beyond its origin story.

The church sits on the north side of the Grange Road in the northern suburbs of Cork city, functioning as a chapel-at-ease, which is to say a secondary place of worship built within an existing parish, in this case St Finbarr's, to serve parishioners who lived at some distance from the mother church. The building follows a straightforward plan, a rectangular nave with a shallow chancel and a vestry tucked against the north wall, but the detailing is anything but plain. An elaborate bellcote rises from the west gable, and neo-Gothic ornament appears throughout, the pointed arches and decorative stonework that Victorian ecclesiastical builders favoured as a deliberate echo of medieval craftsmanship. The treatment is closely related to the west porches at churches in Rathcormack and Carrigaline, and all three are attributed to the Pain brothers, James and George Richard Pain, who were among the most prolific architects working in Munster during the first half of the nineteenth century, responsible for courthouses, country houses, and churches across the region. The churchyard around it is roughly rectangular, about 65 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, bounded by hedgerow to the west and north, a tree-topped earthen bank to the east, and a stone wall to the south. Burials there date from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A former school building to the west is now a private dwelling.