Set into the external facing of the south-east angle of the long rectangular building is the decorated impost of a Romanesque doorway, an ornamental stone from an earlier structure that was simply pressed into service as rubble. It is the kind of detail that rewards a careful walk around the outside: a fragment of twelfth or thirteenth-century craftsmanship embedded in a fifteenth-century wall, reused without ceremony and without explanation.

The church as it stands is probably a fifteenth-century building, but excavation by Rynne in 1988 revealed the north wall of an even earlier Romanesque church buried inside the surviving north wall, confirming that the site had been in use since at least the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. The building accumulated further changes over the centuries. A south transept was added to the east end of the south wall in the later sixteenth century, fitted with twin-light ogee-headed windows in limestone, while the sandstone ogee window in the east gable belongs to the earlier phase of construction. A small priest's room, built in the form of a tower at the west end, may once have carried a groin-vaulted roof, an arched stone ceiling formed by the intersection of two barrel vaults, suggested by a surviving corbel stone and the notably thicker east wall of the tower. By the nineteenth century, the walls were refaced, a north-east angle buttress was added, and a doorway connecting the transept to the main body of the church was blocked up. A storm in 1838 partially destroyed the square tower at the west end, as recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by O'Flanagan.

The church sits on a low natural rise in gently rolling north Tipperary countryside, surrounded by a large rectangular graveyard whose headstones run mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Aerial photography taken in 1969 identified earthworks to the north, north-east, and east of the church that may represent the traces of an early field system, giving the immediate landscape a layered quality that extends well beyond the walls themselves.