The medieval church itself occupies only the western quadrant of this earlier precinct, and a nineteenth-century Church of Ireland building stands just sixteen metres to the south, meaning three distinct phases of Christian worship are visible within a short walk of one another. What sharpens the interest, though, is the east gable of the late medieval ruin, where a blocked ogee-headed window, a carved head wearing what looks like a bishop's mitre, and a private family memorial plaque have been layered one on top of another across several centuries, each intervention partly obscuring the last.

The church served as the parish church of the united parishes of Dorrha and Bonahum, and by 1615 it was recorded as the Rectory of Dorrha, without a curate, its appointment controlled by the Augustinian priory at Lorrha nearby. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 noted three acres of glebelands enclosed by a ditch directly south of the churchyard, described as lying waste at the time. When the antiquary O'Flanagan documented the ruins in 1840, he recorded the east gable still standing, the west gable reduced to rubble, and two finely worked limestone windows, one ogee-headed in the south wall, one pointed in the north, their chiselled stonework still legible. A carved head above the east window was noted again in 1951, though by then it was so thickly covered in ivy it could not be properly examined. That east window, dated to around 1500, had by the early eighteenth century been blocked up and repurposed entirely: in 1709 Christopher Antisell of nearby Sraduff House enclosed the burial ground with a stone wall and built a private walled enclosure onto the east gable, converting the window opening into a decorative surround for a family memorial plaque. A separate plaque, carved in 1705 and dedicated to Lord Bernard O'Kennedy of Coolross, his wife Eleanor Kennedy née Tubman, and their son Jacob, was set into the north wall. Two corbels inside the church add a further puzzle: one is carved with a winged monk or cleric, and a near-identical figure survives at Lorrha Dominican Priory, raising the possibility that the Antisell family moved stonework between the two sites. Inside, the stone altar and two aumbries, small recessed wall cupboards used to store liturgical vessels, survive at the east end, alongside several late medieval architectural fragments bedded into the graveyard floor, apparently reused as grave-markers at some point after the church fell out of use.