The dead were here, certainly; burials have been recorded inside the walls themselves, which points to a private or at least a semi-private arrangement rather than a parish church serving a wider community. That distinction matters, because this low limestone ruin above the River Goul flood plain in County Kilkenny was never really meant for the general population at all.

Writing in the 1870s, the historian Moore suggested that the church was built around 1460 for the use of the castellan of Foulkscourt Castle and his retainers. A castellan was the keeper or governor of a castle, and the tower house at Foulkscourt sits about 730 metres to the north-west, close enough that the relationship between the two buildings would have been obvious in their working lives. The church is a rectangular structure, roughly 20.8 metres east to west and 9.7 metres north to south, built of roughly coursed limestone rubble with a slight outward lean at the base of the walls, a feature known as a base-batter that adds stability. The side walls still stand to around three metres; the gables reach about six. Two doorways were originally set opposite one another in the north and south walls, but both have been stripped of their cut stonework, removed, as Moore bluntly recorded, for the sake of the dressed stone. The south doorway had already been broken through by 1839 and was later filled in, leaving only a wide internal recess where an entrance once was. The windows are more informative. At the east end of both the north and south walls, and in the two-light window of the east gable, the openings were ogee-headed, meaning they curved to a gentle S-shaped point, finished with a square hood-moulding on the outside. The west end of the church had narrower, flat-headed windows, a plainer register that may reflect a functional rather than liturgical zone. A ledge on the inner face of the west gable was probably the support for a gallery, suggesting that the congregation, small and socially specific as it was, nonetheless worshipped in a space of some considered arrangement.