The walls reach roughly three metres, tall enough to feel enclosed but open to the sky, and the round-headed windows in the north and east gables give the shell an almost complete silhouette from a distance. Near the western end, an entrance to a burial vault opens at ground level, while inside, wall tablets mark the positions of further vaults beneath the floor. It is the kind of place that accumulates quiet strangeness, a building that looks substantial until you notice there is nothing left to use.

The structure dates to after 1700, but it was not built on empty ground. Local tradition holds that a medieval church once occupied the same site, and that it was remodelled for Protestant worship during the eighteenth century. That reuse of earlier ecclesiastical ground was a common enough pattern in post-Reformation Ireland, where existing sacred sites were adapted rather than abandoned. The round-headed window openings are consistent with that period of rebuilding. The tower at the northwestern end, a narrow projection measuring roughly 2.4 by 2.8 metres with a doorway in its eastern wall, may relate to this reworking of the site. Whatever medieval fabric once existed here has since vanished entirely; no stonework or surface feature from the earlier building survives above ground. The church's active life as a Protestant place of worship was in any case brief. When St John's Church was built at Loughstown in the early nineteenth century, the congregation moved on, and Kilcumny fell into the condition it retains today.