When the antiquarian Fitzgerald visited in 1826, he recorded carvings of the Crucifixion in alto-relievo, meaning raised relief sculpture, on both the south and north walls of the church. Fourteen years later, when the Ordnance Survey teams came through to compile their letters, those carvings were already gone. No explanation was left behind, and no image of them survives. The ruin itself was already a fragment by then, and those fragments have continued to diminish.

The site sits within a graveyard that was still actively in use when the Ordnance Survey visited in 1840, and the church's history stretches back considerably further than its stonework might now suggest. The place-name appears as Ath-coinn-Lodain at the Synod of Rath Breasail in 1116, and by 1302 it was recorded as Lodone and Lodyn Church. In 1315, during the Bruce invasion of Ireland, the area around the church was militarily significant enough to warrant mention in the Plea Rolls: Thomas Norreys, R. de Clare, Lord of Any, and others seized cattle and supplies to provision an army camped near Lodyn to resist the Scots. By 1615, the church was already recorded as being down, meaning ruinous. Fitzgerald and McGregor, writing in 1826, described it as the walls of an old abbey, noting that the monastic order to which it may have belonged was by then unknown. A little to the south stood the Castle of Luddenmore, at the foot of Knockroe, adding to a landscape that once had considerably more going on than its current quiet suggests.

By the time of the 1840 survey, the east gable and portions of the north and south walls were still standing, the east window retaining its two pointed lights, a form typical of later medieval ecclesiastical work. The walls at that point were roughly ten feet high and four feet thick, built from a mixture of large and small stones set in lime and sand mortar. The west gable and most of the side walls had already been taken down. Visitors today will find the ruins set within the graveyard, which continues to function. The fabric recorded so carefully in the nineteenth century has further eroded since, making those measurements and descriptions all the more useful as a guide to what once stood here.