Its Irish name, Teampall na Ratha, translates as the church of the rath, a reference not to its own enclosure but to a ringfort, a circular earthwork settlement of early medieval Ireland, that lies just thirty metres to the north. The pairing is quietly suggestive: two different kinds of order, ecclesiastical and territorial, placed in close proximity on the same ridge.

By the time the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded the building in 1839, its fabric was already well into decline. The surveyors noted a broken doorway in the south wall roughly three metres from the western gable, windows on both sides at about 2.6 metres from the east gable, each around a metre wide internally, and a larger window in the east gable that was five feet wide and ten feet high to where the arch would have sprung, though by then only the first stone of that arch remained. When the historian William Carrigan visited in the early twentieth century, he found the gables had fallen to the level of the side walls, and he noted corbels projecting from the west end, the stone brackets that would once have supported an interior gallery. A niche near the east end of the south wall is identified as a probable piscina, a small stone basin used in Catholic liturgy for washing sacred vessels, which suggests a fitted interior of some refinement at some point in the building's life. The walls themselves, around 0.7 metres thick, are of roughly cut, coursed masonry, built to last even if they have not been maintained. By 1987, inspectors found the interior entirely overgrown with trees and the remaining walls obscured by ivy.

The graveyard that surrounds the church contains several associated finds worth seeking out: a font, a graveslab, and a leacht, a low commemorative cairn or slab monument of early Christian tradition, often marking a grave or a site of devotion. Together, these fragments make the enclosure considerably more than an abandoned shell.