The name has stuck anyway, attached to a three-storey castellated tower that juts against the west gable of a ruined rectangular church, giving the whole structure an ecclesiastical gravity it may not quite deserve. What stands in the centre of the graveyard is something more layered and stranger than any single monastic story: a building assembled across several generations, each addition slightly at odds with the last, and now filled inside with burial vaults and railed grave plots rather than a congregation.

The site itself is old. The parish church of Inishannon was recorded here in 1615 and 1639, and noted as being in good repair in 1699. Whatever stood then, however, left no visible trace in the surviving fabric, which has no appearance of being earlier than the mid-eighteenth century. The church was rebuilt in 1761 to 1762 and at that point served the Huguenot settlers of the area, French Protestant refugees whose communities had scattered across Ireland following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Around 1801, when the date was cut into the keystone above the annexe door, a semicircular apse was added to the east end, a one-storey annexe to the north wall, and the castellated tower was raised against the west gable, reportedly for the use of the Huguenot congregation. The tower, decorated with shallow masonry pilasters at each corner and a string course between floors, has narrow pointed window openings on each level; its pointed west and east doors form the main passage into the church, the eastern one tucked inside a wider round-arched opening that predates it. A window high on the west gable, also round-arched, was blocked when the tower went up. By 1856 the building had been dismantled and abandoned, replaced by a new church elsewhere in the village.

The ruins sit among the graves at the east end of Inishannon, the interior long since given over to burial vaults, the earliest datable to the 1860s. The apse window has lost its upper section, and the annexe door with its 1801 keystone remains one of the more legible details in the whole composition. The tower, with its battlements and its implausible local name, continues to suggest a grander origin than the records support.