Its two-storey tower, rectangular nave, and shallow apse read as a coherent whole at first glance, but the dates embedded in the stonework and the surviving documentation tell a more complicated story. The pinnacles that once topped the clasped buttresses of the porch and tower are gone, and the louvred openings of the bell loft on the tower's first floor now sit quietly above a building that has not been a working church since 1990.

Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, described it as a small modern edifice in the later English style, with an enriched porch attached to the tower of an ancient structure, suggesting that even then there was a clear distinction between old fabric and new work. A structure on or near the site was recorded as being in good repair as far back as 1669, and a memorial plaque in the nave carries a date of 1712, noted by the Cork historian Charles Smith in 1750. The church as it largely stands today is attributed to the architect George Richard Pain, and is described as having been rebuilt in 1824. Pain, who worked extensively in Munster alongside his brother James, was responsible for a number of Gothic Revival ecclesiastical and domestic buildings across the region; his hand here is visible in the perpendicular-style tracery of the nave windows and the pointed lancets of the apse. The interior was remodelled again in 1898, adding further layers to an already stratified building. Some late nineteenth and early twentieth century stained glass survives, as does a limestone baptismal font of nineteenth-century appearance.