It was put there, according to a note recorded by Holahan in 1883, when the medieval church fell out of religious use and was repurposed as a ball-court. The stone, roughly 2.7 metres long by 0.9 metres wide, remains underground near the western gable, a strange inversion of the building's original purpose. Some of the church's dressed stonework met a different fate: a priest known as Old Father Laracy had stones removed to Ballycallan to build a porch onto the old chapel there, which later became a schoolhouse.

The building itself is rectangular, constructed of roughly coursed limestone and shale rubble, and measures approximately 14.2 metres east to west. Both gables survive to their full height, with a double bellcote, a small structure housing bells, sitting atop the western gable. The original entrance was through the west gable, though the doorway is now blocked and none of its dressed stone surround remains. Just inside, to the south of that doorway, a square limestone holy water stoup still projects from the wall, its angles chamfered and its three outer faces cut into flat D-shapes. At the eastern end, a limestone window with an ogee head, that is, a pointed arch with a gentle S-curve on each side, looks out from the gable, and a shallow piscina, a liturgical basin used for disposing of water used in Mass, sits in a pointed recess in the south wall nearby. The church appears on the Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656, within the barony of Crannagh.

The site has a longer documentary history still. Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan noted that around the year 1230, the Dean and Chapter of St. Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny confirmed a grant to the Abbey of St. Thomas in Dublin, which included the church of Tullaghanbroge and a chapel referred to as "Balykene", identified with this site. The church served as a chapel of ease to Tullaghanbroge, meaning it offered a more accessible place of worship for parishioners who lived at a distance from the main parish church. Its patron was St Nicholas. The church now sits in the north-eastern portion of a roughly D-shaped graveyard, heavily overgrown, its quoin stones at each corner removed, the side walls surviving to no more than two metres. The views from the slope open out to the west, north, and north-east.