It was uncovered briefly in 1981 and described at the time as having "an eerie feel to it, like one of the cadaver figures", before the ivy closed over it again. That detail alone signals that this is not a straightforward ruined church. What stands on this elevated patch of County Westmeath is something considerably stranger: a medieval place of worship that was converted, probably in the 15th or 16th century, into a three-storey residential tower house, its nave remodelled with stone vaulting, beam floors, a spiral staircase in a projecting angle turret, and a drawbar slot cut into the entrance wall for security. The building became, in effect, a fortified dwelling wearing the bones of a church.

The site's documentary trail begins in 1391, when a papal letter recorded the provision of a vicarage at Kylpatryk in the diocese of Meath, valued at 12 marks and vacated by the resignation of one Richard Rowe. By 1518 the place was referred to variously as Dorsykyll or Dorsyngkyl, names that connect to the older townland designation of Dorsankill, recorded in 1632. The nave, with walls some 1.5 metres thick, retains an ogee-cusped window in its south wall, its glazing groove and iron bar holes still legible in the stonework, and a pointed chancel arch dividing the nave from what may or may not be a genuine chancel: the masonry differs, the walls are thinner, and the structure may instead be a post-medieval burial enclosure added by local families. A large table-top tomb sits in its centre, and a marble wall memorial to the Salmon family of Rickardstown House, dated 1901, has been set into the nave's west wall. The quarry immediately to the northwest of the graveyard is thought to have supplied stone for the church's original construction, and the earthwork of the old cart road used to transport that stone down to the public road can still be traced in the field to the north. In 1864 the artist and geologist George Du Noyer painted a watercolour of the north face of the building, showing the stair turret and the vaulted nave roof clearly; his ground plan records the internal niches in the cross-wall as small cupboards, though the stonework beneath the ivy hints they may have been openings.

The church sits within an oval graveyard defined by a 19th-century wall, which Du Noyer's 1864 watercolour shows was not yet standing, and commands wide views across the surrounding countryside from its elevated position. The ruins have been compared by the architectural historian Harold Leask to St. Munna's fortified church at Taghmon, some four kilometres to the southwest, another Westmeath example of the unusual practice of converting a nave into habitable defended space. A bullaun stone, a hollowed boulder typically associated with early Christian sites and sometimes used for grinding or ritual purposes, and a fragment of a stone cross were recorded 6.5 metres south of the church in 1981, though neither could be located on subsequent inspection.