The surviving masonry barely clears half a metre in places, and part of the structure has been quarried away entirely, the north wall and the north end of the east gable simply gone. Yet the site compensates for what the church lacks: within the same graveyard enclosure there is a high cross rising on a hillock to the north, a holy well dedicated to St. Nicholas sitting in a small valley just below, a cross-slab, loose architectural fragments, and a motte, the raised earthwork mound typical of early Norman fortification, sitting roughly 125 metres to the north-north-east. To stand here is to read several centuries of occupation layered into a single compact landscape.

The monastery at Killamery is said, according to the historian Carrigan writing in 1905, to have been founded by St. Gobán Fionn early in the seventh century; his feast day falls on the 6th of December. By the fifteenth century the parish had become prebendal, meaning its tithes and revenues supported a canon of a cathedral rather than a local incumbent. In this case that cathedral was St. Canice's in Kilkenny, and a deed of 1403 recorded in the Calendar of Ormond Deeds names one Richard Whitesyde as cleric and prebendary of Kyllamerry. When Eugene O'Curry surveyed the site for the Ordnance Survey in 1840, he found foundations between three and four feet high on the south-east side of the graveyard, measuring roughly twenty-three feet by eighteen, with walls nearly three feet thick. He noted that this portion appeared to have been the choir, the liturgical eastern end of the church, with traces of a more extensive structure projecting westward. Inside the choir's footprint stood a yew tree five feet in circumference and two white thorns of good growth beside it.

The loose stonework near the high cross gives some sense of what the church once looked like at a finer scale. A fragment of a sandstone window head, round-headed and chamfered on both faces, and a separate jamb fragment with roll-moulding survive in the northern part of the graveyard. Roll-moulding is a rounded, convex profile carved along the edge of an opening, common in Romanesque and later medieval stonework, and its presence here suggests the church was once more elaborate than what the low surviving courses might imply. Nineteenth-century graveslabs lie flat within the interior area, so the choir space has continued in use long after the building itself ceased to function.