The church is known locally as Tempaleen, and what survives is modest: walls no more than about 0.9 metres high, a footprint roughly 12 metres long and 5.5 metres wide. Yet the setting layers several centuries of use into a single field, with an attached burial ground, a holy well, and the ghost of a pre-Christian earthwork all occupying the same quietly elevated ground.

When the Ordnance Survey visited in 1841, even then no one could say when the church had been built. The surveyors described it as "only a small Chapel of Ease", meaning a secondary place of worship built for the convenience of parishioners who lived at some distance from the main parish church of Ratass, in the Diocese of Ardfert. The enclosure surrounding the ruins, defined by a fosse, essentially a ditch, and an old stone wall, was recorded as a burial ground formerly in active use, though largely abandoned by that point except, it was said, for the occasional interment of children. A century later, in 1940, the Kerry Field Club noted that the church appeared to have been built within the circle of an earlier fort, and that its survival owed something to a former occupier of the land who had planted trees in and around the site. Those same trees may account for the overgrowth that obscured much of the site on later inspection. The Field Club also recorded that a holy well nearby had once been the focus of devotional rounds, a traditional practice of prayer performed by walking a prescribed circuit, and that dressed architectural stones from the church had long since been carted off for use in the walls, gateways, and outbuildings of Lismore House, which lies about 230 metres to the south-east.