The parish it served was known as Tullaghanbroge, though the site today goes by the more prosaic name of Grove, a small shift that obscures whatever the original place-name once signified to local people.

By the time Ordnance Survey officers were compiling their letters in 1839, the building was already well along the road to ruin. Their account is precise enough to be almost architectural in feel: the west and east gables still standing, the south wall entire, the north wall broken away from both ends by large gaps, and a doorway indicated only by a breach in the south wall roughly five and a half metres from the west end. Two broken windows survived in the south side, and one in the east gable. The walls themselves were built of large square stones laid in regular courses, suggesting a structure of some ambition for a rural parish church. The building measured approximately nineteen and a half metres by six, a fairly typical scale for a medieval Irish parish church of this kind. The church also appears on the Down Survey barony map of Sheelogher, produced between 1655 and 1656, making it one of the earlier documentary references to the site. The Down Survey was a mid-seventeenth-century cartographic project commissioned to map forfeited Irish lands, and its barony maps, while schematic, are a valuable indicator of what was considered significant at the time. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, drew on this and other sources to identify the building's original parish function.

Within the ruined walls, Carrigan noted the mensa, the flat stone top, of a chest-tomb still in place, while outside the church a coffin-shaped graveslab also survives. These two pieces of funerary stonework, one inside the roofless shell and one in the open graveyard beyond, are quiet survivors of whatever community once maintained this place.