It carries a Latin inscription and the date 1585, yet the church around it was not built until 1825. The stone is a transplant, brought here from Bridgetown Abbey, a medieval Augustinian priory a short distance away, and quietly incorporated into the fabric of a building two and a half centuries its junior. It is the kind of detail that rewards a second look.

The church itself was built in 1825 to a cruciform plan, meaning it has a nave, a chancel, and two transepts forming a cross shape, constructed in coursed ashlar limestone with buttresses, hood mouldings, and a pinnacled embattled tower to the west complete with spire. The tower is two storeys and roughly four metres square. Large pointed windows with perpendicular tracery, a decorative style associated with late Gothic Revival work, light the nave and chancel, while the transepts have pointed windows set in stepped headed rebates. Between the nave and each transept, narrow angled gabled structures are set at forty-five degrees, an unusual junction solution; the south-eastern one serves as a vestry. The building is attributed to James Pain, an English-born architect who settled in Ireland and became one of the most prolific church designers of the early nineteenth century, working extensively across Munster. The church was designed to accommodate two hundred persons, and it stands on or near the site of an earlier place of worship that was, according to a source from 1694, much damaged by the wars of the preceding decades but then in the process of being repaired. Further improvements were carried out in 1882.

The graveyard surrounding the church sits atop the hill, and the borrowed stone in the transept wall offers an unexpected thread connecting this quiet Church of Ireland site to the longer, more turbulent history of religious life in North Cork.