Reaching a height of up to 4.5 metres in places, part of it is not simply a boundary for the dead but a surviving section of Bandon's old town wall, incorporated into the churchyard enclosure rather than demolished or forgotten. The eastern wall, too, follows the line of that same fortification. It is an odd and quietly arresting thing: the infrastructure of a seventeenth-century plantation town repurposed as the frame for a parish graveyard, the two histories folded together without ceremony.

The original church on this elevated site was built in 1614, with assistance from Sir Richard Boyle, the powerful and acquisitive first Earl of Cork who was one of the dominant figures in Munster's plantation landscape during the early seventeenth century. That building was replaced by the current cruciform structure, meaning it is laid out in the shape of a cross, with a long east-west axis, side aisles, and an extended chancel, in 1849. A pinnacled tower rises from the north wall. Inside, monuments from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries survive in some number, and a limestone font dated 1719 remains in use, a small continuity across three centuries of the building's life. The headstones in the surrounding graveyard run from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, the enclosure itself having been extended westward at some point to accommodate the accumulation of the dead.