The observation is tucked in almost casually, after careful measurements of windows and wall widths, as though the compiler felt obliged to mention it but could not quite account for it. The church has long since lost the ivy-smothered windows and the gable walls that prompted that description, and what remains now is little more than a low earthen ridge tracing the outline of a rectangular building on a west-facing slope in County Kilkenny.

The place goes by at least two names, each carrying its own history. Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan recorded it as Temple-Fennell, noting that local people also called it the Church of Gorrychreen, meaning the Church of the Field of the Withered Tree, while some older residents still used the name Fennell's Church. The dedication appears in the Red Book of Ossory, a medieval episcopal register for the Diocese of Ossory, spelled variously as "ffynnel", "Fynel", "ffynel", and "ffynell", suggesting a site of some standing in the medieval ecclesiastical landscape of the region. By the time the Ordnance Survey letters were compiled in 1839, the building was already a shell: the gables and small portions of the side walls were still standing, and two curvilinear pointed windows survived in the east gable, each about 2.1 metres high and just over a metre wide, though their fronts were broken away. A doorway in the south wall had been reduced to a single chamfered block of freestone. By 1994, even those remnants had subsided; the gables reached no higher than 0.75 metres, and the walls had become sod-covered footings, the interior measuring roughly 15.5 metres east to west and 7 metres north to south. The church sits in the southern portion of a roughly rectangular graveyard, on a slope with open views to the south, west, and north-west, a stream running north to south about 180 metres to the west.