Primitive in execution, it is locally identified as Crom Dubh, a figure from Irish mythology associated with harvest and, in older belief, with a pre-Christian deity whose feast day fell on the last Sunday of July. The head's placement inside a medieval Christian chancel is itself quietly arresting, and scholars including Rynne and Harbison have noted its resemblance to other Irish stone heads of probable pagan Celtic date. It was on Domhnach Chrom Dubh, that same feast day, that a great pattern, or religious gathering, was traditionally held at Cloghane following pilgrimage to nearby Mount Brandon, and the ritual circuit known as Turas an Teampaill included visits to this church and to St. Brendan's well close by. A medieval sundial is also visible in the south wall, an uncommon survival in any Irish ruin.

The church itself, known as Teampall an Chlocháin or Cloghane Church, is largely of 13th-century construction, though the earliest documentary record of a church here, listed as 'Clothan' and valued at 13 shillings and 4 pence, appears in the Papal Taxation List of 1302 to 1307 for the Diocese of Ardfert. By 1615 the building was apparently still serviceable; a Royal Visitation of that year found it in repair, and records note that its parsonage then belonged to the Abbey of Owney in Limerick, at that point in the possession of the late Sir John FitzEdmund. By the mid-18th century, however, Charles Smith was recording it as ruinous. Then in 1828 a First Fruits church, one of the Church of Ireland buildings funded under a crown grant scheme, was erected directly over the site of the nave, effectively erasing it. What survives of the medieval structure is the east gable, standing nearly to its full height, and stretches of the north and south chancel walls. The east window is round-headed, set in a chamfered recess with widely splayed inner openings; the north wall retains a rectangular doorway with chamfered head and jambs once rebated for a door secured by both draw bar and bolt. At the east end of the south wall, a piscina, a small stone basin used by priests for rinsing liturgical vessels, survives with a roll-moulded edge and a moulded corbel base.

When John O'Donovan visited in August 1841, he measured and described the remains in considerable detail, noting walls of chiselled brown sandstone still standing nine feet high. Today the entire structure is heavily draped in ivy, with holly and elder growing within and around it, and the interior ground level has risen well above the original floor due to centuries of burials pressing in on every side. The congestion of the graveyard, with its layered medieval and later 19th-century sections, means that overground tombs now crowd the chancel interior and obscure what may be the low footing of the original nave-to-chancel division.