The walls of randomly coursed sandstone still stand to around three metres, the dressed quoins at the corners holding firm, and the basic geometry of the rectangular nave remains largely intact. What makes the building quietly puzzling is the absence of the things you would ordinarily expect around a church of this kind: no enclosure, no visible grave markers, no clear signs of the burial ground that Ordnance Survey Name Books once referenced on the island. The building stands, more or less whole, in a landscape that has shed most of its other evidence.

Inishtemple Island sits in Lough Melvin, a lake straddling the Leitrim and Fermanagh border, and the island itself is modest in scale, roughly 900 metres east to west and only about 270 metres wide. The church measures just under thirteen metres internally along its long axis, which places it in the range of a simple single-nave structure typical of early ecclesiastical foundations in the west of Ireland. Two doorways were positioned opposite one another in the north and south walls, a pairing sometimes interpreted as a practical arrangement for processions or for separating different groups of worshippers. The southern doorway, though now blocked, retains a small projecting stone on the east jamb that once served as a latch rest, a detail that brings the original carpentry of a long-vanished wooden door briefly into focus. The north doorway has been destroyed entirely, and the east window, which would typically have been the most prominent opening in a church of this type, is also gone. Only a narrow slit window in the south wall survives to give a sense of how carefully light was admitted.