The building is what remains of the Church of Ireland parish church of Templebreedy, known as St Matthew's, and the contrast between its relatively elaborate architectural details and its gutted, open-sky interior gives the ruin a quietly dissonant quality. A weathervane once topped the spire, inscribed with the date 1856, though it is no longer there.

The church's history involves at least two distinct phases of building and one deliberate act of abandonment. According to Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, the structure was erected in 1778 close to the site of an earlier church, suggesting a long continuity of religious use at this spot. The building that survives is rectangular, measuring roughly fifteen metres east to west internally, with a gabled porch at the west end covered by a rounded stone vault. A slender square tower rises from the junction of this porch with the west gable, carrying the stone spire above it. The south wall is lit by three segmental-arched window openings, and there is a round-arched window in the east wall; traces of weatherslating, a technique of overlapping thin stone or slate to protect rubble masonry from the elements, are still visible on the outer walls. The church was unroofed in the late 1860s, when a new Church of Ireland building was constructed in nearby Crosshaven town, leaving St Matthew's to fall gradually into its present state. Coleman and Healy, writing between 1904 and 1906, still recorded the vane and its date inscription, which suggests the spire itself remained substantially intact well into the early twentieth century.

The ruin sits near the southern end of the graveyard at Kilcolta, which provides some immediate context for its setting. The combination of the intact spire, the vaulted porch, and the roofless nave makes it a structurally legible ruin, the kind where the original form of the building is still readable even in its reduced state.