Tucked into the north-west corner of a small rectangular graveyard in County Waterford, the ruined church at Islandikane retains a surprising amount of its fabric for a building that had already fallen out of use by the early seventeenth century. The walls survive almost complete, their quoins still in place and a slight base-batter, a gentle outward slope at the foot of the masonry intended to add stability, still visible along the west and south faces. Most striking is a petal-decorated piscina set within a pointed aumbry in the south wall: the piscina is a shallow stone basin used for rinsing communion vessels, and its carved petal ornament is a small flourish of craft in an otherwise plain, undifferentiated structure measuring roughly eighteen metres from east to west.

The church served as the parish church of Islandikane and, by 1541, was recorded as a rectory belonging to the Knights Hospitallers of Kilbarry, a military-religious order whose Irish properties were formally listed around the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Within a few generations the building had been abandoned; a survey of the Protestant diocese of Waterford compiled in 1615 already describes it as ruins. The entrances at the west end of both the north and south walls are destroyed, as are all the windows, including a large east window and smaller openings in the west gable and along the upper walls. What remains is largely the shell, but it is a coherent and legible one, sitting quietly on its south-facing slope above the graveyard that still surrounds it.