The church, by contrast, is barely a memory in stone. Only the north wall stands to any meaningful height, reaching 3.2 metres at its eastern end, while the west wall has been reduced to little more than a low ridge of rubble, and the south wall has almost entirely vanished. What remains is enough to read the building, but only just.

The foundation was known formerly as Kilclispen, or alternatively as St Crispin's church, though nothing is recorded about its earliest history or the circumstances of its establishment. During the Early Medieval Period, this corner of Tipperary lay within the Kingdom of Ossory, a polity that functioned as a buffer state between the Laigin to the north and the Eoghanacht to the west, and whose political situation shaped much of the ecclesiastical geography of the region. The church itself is built from roughly coursed sandstone rubble, with small slate pinning stones filling the gaps between larger blocks, and sits on a natural east-facing terrace with Carrigadoon hill prominent to the southwest. One detail in the surviving north wall repays attention: a narrow ogee-headed window, the ogee being a double-curved profile common in later medieval stonework, cut from sandstone and chamfered on its outer face. The internal sill contains a spud-stone, a small carved block intended to anchor a wooden shutter bar, though in this case no eye was cut through it, meaning the bar would have slid up into a void behind the lintel rather than pivoting in the conventional way. It is a small, slightly puzzling feature. Inside the church, slate slabs have been dumped across the floor, reportedly brought from a nearby quarry, and a worn red sandstone corbel projects from the north wall near its western end, the remnant of whatever internal structure once ran the length of the building.