At the north-western corner of a graveyard in Lyons, Co. Kildare, stands a ruined parish church whose fabric has been quietly cannibalised over the centuries in ways that reward close attention. The base of a baptismal font has been repurposed as a jamb stone at the south doorway. A blocked northern doorway now frames a 16th-century armorial plaque belonging to the Aylmer family. The chancel, sealed off behind iron railings and galvanised sheeting, has been converted into a private burial vault, its finely dressed granite quoins still visible on the east gable wall. The building is technically standing to its original height, yet almost every opening, from the ogee-headed windows, a window type characterised by a double curve meeting at a point, to the west gable ope, has been bricked or plastered over, giving the interior the atmosphere of a place closed in on itself.

The church was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and built of angular, undressed rubble limestone, with granite used for the more considered elements: quoins, jamb stones, the chancel arch, and those ogee-headed windows with their fluted jambs, barring holes, and glazing grooves. The nave measures roughly 14.25 metres by 8.5 metres, and the chancel approximately 7.2 metres by 6.7 metres. A plain granite chancel arch, 2.3 metres wide and 3.4 metres high, separates the two spaces, and a pair of corbels, one intact, one broken, project from the wall on either side of its springing. The chancel itself was substantially rebuilt at some point; its north wall sits just inside the line of an earlier wall, and a scar on the east gable records an older, steeper roofline that predates the current shallow-pitched slate roof. The south doorway is perhaps the most arresting feature: its limestone arch-stones carry four angels carved in high relief, an unusual degree of ornament for a rural parish church. A late-17th-century slate plaque is set into a small recess on the outer face of the south wall, and 19th- and 20th-century commemorative plaques line the plastered interior of the north wall, the nave having continued in use for burials long after the building itself fell out of regular worship.