That last detail, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839, captures something about how religious practice often outlasted its own explanation in rural Ireland.

The church is aligned east to west, as was conventional, and its oldest surviving fabric is the square chancel, whose east wall alone is 1.3 metres thick. At some point a flat-headed doorway was inserted into that east wall, an unusual arrangement suggesting the building was adapted for different uses over time, with a window positioned above it and further windows in the north and south walls. A medieval font sits at the base of the south window, and medieval graveslabs are built into the fabric of the site, one inset into a doorway, another in the graveyard itself. Carrigan noted an additional pair of coffin-shaped slabs with raised crosses, dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, lying in the graveyard separately. The nave between the chancel and the tower dates to the mid-eighteenth century and was a more modest construction, with lancet windows set in brick jambs and traces of a gallery at the east end. Blocked doorways in the north and south walls, each with a small window inserted above, suggest the building was reconfigured more than once before it was restored in 1818 and then decommissioned before the century was out. The church already appears on the Down Survey barony map of Kells from 1655 to 1656, where a symbol marks both the church and its glebe lands, the plots of agricultural land historically attached to a parish church for the support of its clergyman. By 1839 the surrounding graveyard was still unenclosed; its present irregular boundary was established sometime after that date.