What makes it worth a second look is partly its awkward, almost experimental architecture: a plain rectangular nave with paired windows running along both the north and south walls, an extremely shallow chancel at the east end fitted with three grouped lancet windows, and a squat tower to the west that carries a high hipped roof and a pronounced base batter, that outward splaying at the foot of a wall designed to add stability and visual weight. The combination gives the building an unfinished or slightly improvised quality, as though its various parts arrived from different moments.

That impression is not entirely wrong. The church was built in 1814 or 1815, following a Privy Council order that the site of the parish church of Knockmourn be changed. The earlier parish church had stood to the northwest of Conna village, and the relocation created what was effectively a new building for an old congregation. The tower appears to be a later addition still: by 1860 a vestry had, as Brady recorded in his 1863 survey, "lately been added to the church", and it is thought that the tower was erected around the same time. So the building as it now stands is really the product of at least two distinct phases of construction spread across roughly half a century. The graveyard surrounding it reflects that relatively recent origin; the earliest inscribed headstones date only from the mid-nineteenth century, giving the whole site a compressed and legible history rather than the deep, layered one you might expect from an older foundation.