It is a medieval image of self-sacrifice, and it sits in a building whose own history reads as a series of layered reinventions, each generation making use of what the last left behind.

The church at Lorrha is dedicated to St. Ruadhán, known as the 'lamp of Lothra', whose feast day fell on the 15th of April, reputedly when the cuckoo began to call. He died in 584 and was said to be the son of Fearghas Bearn of the Uí Dhuach clan, from the Fassadinin and Crannagh baronies of Co. Kilkenny. The Annals of Innisfallen record a violent episode here in 1037, when Cu Chaille, son of Cennetaig and King of Musgraige, was killed along with his son in front of the stone church after being dragged from the altar. The building that stands today is likely of eleventh-century origin or earlier, though its fabric carries centuries of addition and alteration. The masonry is cyclopean, meaning it is built from large, roughly coursed blocks, and the walls retain projecting antae, the slightly extended side walls characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical building. Above the existing fifteenth-century doorway, the remains of an earlier arch survive, with a carved head at its apex and capitals and foliage decoration dating to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. Sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, the western end of the church was converted into a two-storey priest's residence, with a barrel-vaulted ground floor, a mural staircase in the south wall, and a twin-light ogee-headed window lighting the upper room. By the time of the Royal Visitation of 1615, the building was already in a lopsided state of repair, described tersely as 'chancell up church down'. A Church of Ireland addition was appended to the east gable in the nineteenth century.

The church sits in the eastern part of a large sub-rectangular graveyard, and the remains of two high crosses stand nearby within the same enclosure. The carved doorway, set into the south wall, rewards a close look; the pelican motif in particular is a quiet piece of medieval visual theology that most visitors walk past without noticing.