The church itself is gone, but an early nineteenth-century three-floored tower has survived on the site, standing in quiet contrast to the sub-rectangular raised platform that archaeology tells us was once the footprint of a significant parish and episcopal structure.

The antiquarian Thomas Westropp recorded the building in 1904 to 1905, before its final destruction, and his plan gives a clear sense of its scale: a nave measuring roughly 14.6 metres by 7.8 metres, with a chancel of approximately 8.8 metres by 6.4 metres. He noted four plain pointed arches to each side of the nave, an east window in a transitional Romanesque-to-Gothic style dating to around 1200, and what he called a curiously fretted font. The lands of Shanagolden, known in later medieval documents as Sengola or Seanguala, had been attached to the diocese of Limerick during the Anglo-Norman period. Between 1225 and 1250, Bishop Hubert de Burgh granted them to the canons and vicars of St. Mary's Cathedral in Limerick, though the manor appears to have continued functioning as an episcopal estate through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A rental document from 1336, preserved in the Black Book of Limerick, records that the burgesses of Seanguala paid 100 shillings annually to the bishop, confirming that the settlement had formal borough status. After that date, the record goes quiet, and it is generally presumed that Shanagolden followed the fate of many Limerick boroughs, quietly contracting and depopulating during the later Middle Ages.

The site sits on rising ground to the north of the present town. There is no dramatic ruin to greet a visitor; the raised earthwork platform is the main physical trace of the medieval church, and reading it requires some patience and a willingness to interpret the landscape rather than a standing structure. The surviving tower, dating to the early 1800s, provides a useful landmark. Those with an interest in ecclesiastical archaeology or in the faded borough settlements of medieval Munster will find the combination of Westropp's published plan and the near-invisible ground evidence a quietly instructive contrast.