The church was abandoned, the parish relocated, and yet people were still being buried within reach of its threshold. The walls still stand to roughly their full height, minus the upper section of the west gable, though the structure is described as being in poor condition. The building has an unusual form for a rural Irish church of its period: a rectangular nave with an apse at the east end, the apse being rectangular on the outside but curving to a semi-elliptical shape internally, a feature more commonly associated with earlier ecclesiastical architecture.

The church served the parish of Garrycloyne and was most likely built in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. An order to relocate the parish church was made in 1766, and by 1777 the congregation had moved to Blarney village, leaving this building at Knocknalyre to fall gradually into disuse. The nave measured roughly 13.9 metres east to west and 7.6 metres north to south, with two windows in each of the north and south walls and a central window in the apse. All the window surrounds are now missing. A glebe house, the residence provided for the parish clergyman, was constructed in 1804 on ground immediately to the south-east of the graveyard; it is a two-storey over basement building with a four-bay rear front and a two-bay entrance front, and appears to have been built well after the older church had already been given up.

The ruin sits near the eastern end of the graveyard at Knocknalyre, on ground that slopes downward to the east. The graveyard itself continued to receive burials after the church was abandoned, as that 1824 headstone positioned at the doorway makes plain, suggesting the site retained some local significance long after it ceased to function as a place of worship.