Today, the lower courses of the walls survive in two disconnected sections, divided by 19th and early 20th century burials and headstones that have displaced much of the original fabric. The north wall has lost an entire central stretch to graves. What is left stands no higher than about 0.75 metres at its tallest point, the rough stonework outlining a building that once measured roughly 15.75 metres east to west and 7.2 metres north to south. About 50 metres south of the graveyard, a holy well sits in an adjacent field, a pairing of church and water source that suggests a much older sacred geography beneath the medieval layers.

The place name itself carries a crusading footnote. According to Ronan, writing in 1941, Palmerstown takes its name from Ailred the Palmer, a crusader who founded the Hospital of St. John the Baptist outside Newgate in Dublin before 1188. Around the same time, a man named Richard Camerarius gave the entire vill of Glennuge, the Irish name being Glenn Uisce, meaning valley of water, to that hospital. The chapel, dedicated to St. James, passed into the institutional orbit of the priory of St. John the Baptist, and later to the fraternity of St. John of Jerusalem at Kilmainham. By the ecclesiastical taxation survey of 1302 to 1307, the chapel was assessed at £10 13s. 4d. The 1630 Visitation of Archbishop Bulkeley found the parish in a ruinous and financially exhausted state: the vicar reported receiving no more than twenty shillings a year for the previous decade, the chancel was already collapsed, and almost all the parishioners were recorded as recusants, meaning they refused to attend the established church. The parish was eventually absorbed into the union of Clonmethan in 1675.

The site sits within a graveyard that retains its notably circular shape, a form often associated with early medieval ecclesiastical enclosures in Ireland, where the boundary of a circular churchyard can predate the medieval building it surrounds by several centuries. The graveyard remains in use, so visitors should treat the space with appropriate care. The wall fragments are low and unenclosed, easy to overlook at first glance, but worth tracing carefully: the east gable, the west gable, and the surviving stub of the north wall together preserve enough of the plan to give a sense of the original structure. The holy well to the south, in the field beyond the graveyard boundary, requires a short walk and may be less immediately visible depending on the season and vegetation.