The building went up in 1836, served a rural Catholic community for well over a century, and was then simply left when the parish moved on. By 1969 a modern church had been built at Dromahane, roughly a kilometre to the north, and the old T-shaped chapel on the western side of the road was no longer needed. Local accounts suggest it was demolished in 1985, though the shell and its surroundings retain enough to make a visit worth pausing over.

The chapel was a modest but considered piece of early nineteenth-century rural ecclesiastical building. Its plan is T-shaped, with a short nave running east to west and two long arms projecting from the western end, a layout that allowed a congregation to gather around a central altar without the expense of a full cruciform structure. The walls are rendered over random rubble, and the windows throughout are pointed, with some retaining fragments of stained glass. On the eastern entrance gable, a bellcote sits atop a central breakfront, a small projecting section of wall that adds a little formality to the facade, with a pointed door below and a pointed window above it. The interior has been gutted, but nineteenth-century memorial plaques remain fixed to the walls, and a simple A-frame timber roof still covers the space. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records it plainly as "Kilpadder R.C. Chapel", which places it in the landscape just a few years after it was built.

The churchyard around the chapel is enclosed by a mixture of boundaries: an earthen bank to the northwest, a rendered wall with a gateway to the northeast, trees to the southeast, and a scarp to the southwest where steps descend to a mass path, the kind of informal track used by congregations walking to worship before roads made that unnecessary. The southeastern quadrant of the yard is heavily overgrown and is said locally to contain unmarked burials. Elsewhere in the churchyard there are early twentieth-century memorials, as well as the burial place of the Carroll-Leahy family.