Sometime after 1843, the Townsend family inserted a large mausoleum into the eastern half of the nave, and a separate vault belonging to the Ruby family occupies the south-west corner. The original windows in the east gable were blocked up to accommodate these additions, and a new door was cut through the gable to provide access to the Townsend mausoleum. The result is a building that reads, at first glance, as a straightforward roofless ruin, but which contains, embedded within its walls, the private burial architecture of two families who moved quickly to claim the space once the congregation had moved on.

The parish church of Donoghmore, as it was known, is a gabled rectangular nave measuring roughly fifteen and a half metres along its east-west axis. Its origins are placed in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, though the building had a troubled early history; it was already roofless by 1774, before being reroofed and repaired in 1792. That repair campaign is likely when the western porch was added and a second window inserted into the east gable. The round-arched doorway at the centre of the west gable and the blocked round-arched window embrasures along the south and north walls survive from the earlier phases of the building. When a new parish church was built approximately two and a half kilometres to the north-east in 1843, the old structure was abandoned, and the Townsend and Ruby families appear to have acted fairly promptly in converting parts of it for funerary use.

The ruin sits at the centre of a graveyard, so the approach brings a visitor through the surrounding burial ground before reaching the church itself. The blocked windows and successive alterations to the east gable are legible from outside, and give a reasonable sense of how the building was incrementally adapted over roughly two centuries.