It is not a ruin in any dramatic sense; it is a fragment, the kind of remnant that invites you to reconstruct a building mostly in your imagination. The wall is built from large squared sandstone blocks set on a plinth, and the quality of the stonework suggests Romanesque construction, the rounded-arch, solid-masonry style that reached Ireland in the twelfth century. A short section of the west gable was still standing when Bowman recorded the site in 1934, measuring about seven and a half feet high, but that piece has since collapsed, leaving the north wall as the sole survivor of a church that once measured internally 38 feet 8 inches by 18 feet 5 inches.

The church's history stretches back at least to 1291, when it was recorded in the Papal Taxation, a survey commissioned by Pope Nicholas IV to assess church revenues across Europe, often cited as one of the earliest systematic records of Irish parishes. That entry confirms Subulter as an established parish by the late thirteenth century, though the Romanesque character of the surviving masonry points to origins perhaps a century earlier. By 1774 the building was already described as being in ruins, a condition noted by Brady and recorded in his later published work, meaning it had been derelict for well over two centuries before any formal archaeological attention was paid to it.