When Ordnance Survey officers passed through in 1840, they noted that the building had been perfectly intact until about two years before, when the roof was stripped in preparation for renovation and then left open to the sky. It has remained that way ever since. The church stands in the northern quadrant of a square-shaped graveyard, its rectangular footprint still clear, an entrance porch at the western end still marking where a working congregation once came and went.

The site carries a long ecclesiastical history that sits awkwardly against its modest, late appearance. Known in Irish as Teampall Ard Caithne, or locally as Templeamhullain, taking its colloquial name from the townland of Mellon, it served as the medieval parish church of Ardcanny in the barony of Kenry. The antiquarian Thomas Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, traced the parish name through a string of documentary records: Ardcatini in 1201, Ardchatin in 1204, and Ardcathny in both 1302 and 1418, by which point it had become a prebendal church, meaning it was attached to a cathedral chapter and supported a canon's income. The scholar John O'Donovan read the place-name as meaning Hill of Cana, though Westropp noted that a similarly named site in Kerry pointed instead to the arbutus tree. The glebe land, the plot assigned to support the parish clergyman, lay immediately to the west of the church, visible on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map.

The surrounding landscape is quietly dense with archaeology. Two ringforts sit within 250 metres, one to the north-north-west and another to the south-south-west, and Mellon Castle lies roughly 470 metres to the north-east. A stream runs just 25 metres to the west of the church. St Bridget's holy well is about 780 metres further west again, recorded in the same Ordnance Survey Letters that described the ruined church. Visitors approaching the site will find it on low-lying reclaimed grassland rather than any commanding elevation, which makes the cluster of monuments around it feel all the more compressed. The graveyard itself remains the clearest way to orient yourself; the church ruins occupy its northern quarter, and the entrance porch on the western gable gives the best sense of the building's original layout.