Two sculptured panels sit above the arch, one showing an equestrian figure, the other a pair of figures including at least one ecclesiastic. Carved inscriptions on the jambs name the people connected with its making, including a prayer for Niam, daughter of Corc, and for Mathgamain O Ciarmeic, under whose auspices the church was built. The portal dates to roughly the 1140s or 1150s, and the scholar Tadhg O'Keeffe has argued that, despite its geographical proximity to the similar doorway at Killeshin in Co. Offaly, it is stylistically closer to the earlier Cormac's Chapel at Cashel. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had become, as the antiquarian Prim recorded in 1847, the common whetstone of the village, where knives, razors, and cleavers were sharpened against the ancient carvings. A later attempt to protect it with a gate went badly, with one hinge driven so forcefully into the wall that it dislocated some of the sculpted stones.

The site has a much older foundation beneath it. A monastic church was established here in the late sixth or early seventh century by St Lachtain, who died in 622. Scholarship suggests that much of the fabric of the west end of the nave, whose internal dimensions run to roughly 12.8 metres by 7.1 metres, may pre-date 1050, making it one of the larger early churches in the kingdom of Osraige. A change in the masonry of the south wall, visible around fourteen metres from the west end, marks the boundary between an earlier and later phase of building. A finial found in a graveyard at Clontubbrid, about three kilometres to the north, may once have surmounted the Freshford gable; the worn carving shows a robed standing figure flanked by bosses, in a composition compared to the Romanesque pediment at Roscrea Cathedral. Freshford was likely an episcopal see before being absorbed into the See of Ossory in 1218, and by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the parish revenues supported a canon of St Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny. The church fell into ruin by the early eighteenth century and was rebuilt for Protestant worship in 1730. During alterations in the 1950s, an ogee-headed piscina, a small basin set into a wall for rinsing liturgical vessels, was uncovered in the chancel's south wall alongside a gothic doorway in cut stone; both were left in place and re-plastered over. Fragments of radial ashlar reused in the fabric of a later annexe may, according to one study, have originally belonged to a round tower or apse, though no such structure survives above ground.