The walls still stand to a reasonable height, and the space within them is now given over entirely to graves, a quiet reversal of the usual relationship between a church and its surrounding yard.

The building is modest in scale, roughly twelve and a half metres long by just over six metres wide internally, with walls nearly a metre thick. It was recorded as being in repair as late as 1688, and several of its architectural features suggest a structure that was maintained and adapted over time rather than simply left to decline. The round-headed chancel arch at the eastern end is a Romanesque form, the semicircular arch associated with early medieval ecclesiastical architecture in Ireland, while the segmentally arched windows lighting the interior represent a later style. A bellcote, a small gabled structure built to carry a bell, sits on the western gable above what was a later porch entrance, and there is evidence that a gallery once occupied the western end of the interior. By 1849, however, the congregation had moved on. The construction of St. Paul's church drew worshippers away, and the old building at Knockaneady was abandoned to the elements and to the dead. The community's response was practical: rather than let the interior go entirely to ruin, it was pressed into service for burials, filling the shell of the church with headstones and the quiet accumulation of generations.