Where a plain entrance might suffice, the builder commissioned something closer to a set piece: a central breakfront of ashlar limestone rising to a bellcote, an ogee-headed doorway beneath an ogee-headed window, and pointed niches flanking both. The ogee, a double curve borrowed from Gothic detailing, lends the whole composition an air of deliberate ornament unusual for a rural parish church of its period.

An inscribed stone on the wall gives the date 1838, though Samuel Lewis, writing in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland a year before that stone was set, already described the building as recently rebuilt, which suggests the work was under way or recently completed around 1837. The church is closely related in design to Dromagh church in the same county, and the stone sculptures at both buildings have been attributed to a carver named Charles O'Connell. The walls are rendered with raised quoins, the corners dressed to stand proud of the surrounding plasterwork, and the pointed windows are set in cut-limestone surrounds, giving the building a considered finish that repays a closer look than it typically receives.

The church sits along the long axis running north-east to south-west, orientated slightly off the conventional east-west alignment common to earlier ecclesiastical buildings. That small deviation, combined with the elaborate entrance gable facing south-west rather than west, gives the structure a slightly unconventional presence in the landscape, as though the geometry of the site was allowed to take precedence over liturgical convention.