Early twentieth-century observers could still describe a partial west gable and fragments of side walls, but today nothing is visible at ground level. The site is curious less for what can be seen than for what the documentary record suggests once stood here: a small ecclesiastical building whose history reaches back through layers of Norman lordship, monastic transfer, and the particular medieval practice of praying for the dead.

The earliest hint of a church at Brandane appears obliquely in a charter connected to New Ross, possibly dating from the early thirteenth century. Its origins, however, lie in the ambitions of Hervey de Montmorency, a figure from the first wave of the Anglo-Norman settlement of Ireland. Around 1177, when Hervey entered the monastery at Christchurch in Canterbury, he granted the ecclesiastical rights over the churches of the baronies of Shelbourne and Bargy, including Brandane, to that house. In 1245 Christchurch passed those rights on to the Cistercian abbey of Tintern in Co. Wexford. The document recording that transfer gives a hint of what Brandane may have been: the chapel was required to provide perpetual masses for the dead, and specifically for the soul of Hervey himself, which suggests it may have functioned as a chantry chapel, that is, a chapel endowed specifically to fund ongoing prayers for a patron's soul. When Tintern abbey was dissolved in 1540, the village of St. Brandan and 180 acres were rented to a Patrick Brown, but the chapel goes unmentioned, suggesting it had already fallen out of use. The place-name itself is telling: Brandane derives from Brendan, the Irish Bréanainn, a name shared by at least three Irish saints.

The site sits at the foot of a gentle north-facing slope, with a small east-west stream running roughly fifty metres to the north. The surrounding land is pasture, and the ruins, such as they are, have long since been absorbed into it.