What gives this particular site its quietly odd character is a granite slab that once lay outside its doorway, roughly two metres long and a quarter-metre thick, inscribed at its centre with a small irregular cross that locals called the goose's foot. By 1907 it was still there; it is not evident now. The church itself sits within a graveyard that covers the entire triangular headland, bounded by sea-cliffs to the north and south-east, yet despite the considerable extent of that burial ground, only a single headstone and one grave-marker remain visible, the rest swallowed by dense sea-grass and blackthorn.

The church served St Helen's parish, and its history can be traced in fragments across several centuries. At the Dissolution in 1538, it was impropriate to the Augustinian nuns of Grany in Co. Kildare, meaning the revenues of the parish had been granted to that religious house rather than administered locally. When Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, conducted a visitation in 1615, he found a curate named Phillip Rawe in post and the building in reasonable repair. Sometime between that date and around 1680, when a writer named Synnott compiled what appears to have been a survey of the area's churches, the building had either been abandoned or had declined to the point where it no longer merited a mention. What remains is a small, undivided rectangular structure, its walls still standing to between one and two metres, with a collapsed entrance in the west wall. By the time John O'Donovan visited around 1840 he noted the doorway had been pointed, that is, finished in a Gothic arch, though a description from around 1907 records a large stone lintel with a slit window above it, suggesting the opening had been altered or that the two observers were describing different features. The south wall may itself be a later rebuild, sitting slightly inside the line of the east wall in a way that suggests it does not belong to the original build.

The graveyard is bordered to the west of the church by a sunken path, worn down to a metre below the surrounding ground, which gives a sense of how long and how regularly people made their way here. St Helen's Well lies about sixty metres further west, a proximity that is typical of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where a church, graveyard, and holy well often formed a cluster around a single founding figure or local cult.