The Mothel handball club constructed an alley against the church's west gable at some point, incorporating the east wall of an adjoining tower into the structure, and later raising it with concrete blocks and a corrugated iron roof. The result is a building that reads, from certain angles, as two entirely different centuries occupying the same footprint simultaneously.

The church was dedicated to St Nicholas of Tolentine, whose feast falls on the tenth of September, and it survived the Reformation as a Protestant place of worship. By 1732 it was in poor enough condition that it was, according to the historian Carrigan writing in 1905, almost entirely thrown down and rebuilt. Dr Tennison, the Protestant Bishop of Ossory, noted in his Visitation Book of that year that the church of Mothel "was lately begun to be rebuilt." Protestant services continued here until around 1800, when a new parish church was erected at nearby Coolcullen and the old building was effectively abandoned. By 1839, when an Ordnance Survey correspondent recorded his observations, the walls still stood to something close to their full height, the west gable retaining a pointed doorway some seven feet four inches high and a small belfry above it, along with evidence of several windows in the north and south walls. That same doorway, he noted, had already been closed off for use as a ball alley. The church measured roughly forty-seven and a half feet in length and was built throughout of small, thin, square stones, none of them dressed.

What remains today is fragmentary but legible. The east gable is gone, and the eastern ends of both the north and south walls have collapsed, though the surviving sections reach about three metres in height. The walls are limestone rubble with occasional larger sandstone blocks, and the window embrasures that remain show the characteristic splayed openings of the medieval period, wider on the inside than the outside to let in the maximum light. The church sits in a rolling grassland beside a still-used burial ground, with open views across the Dinin valley to the north.