Its embattled tower, complete with corner pinnacles, gives it the outline of something far grander than a simple parish church, a deliberate architectural choice that was fashionable in the Gothic Revival style of the period, when battlements and pinnacles were applied to churches across Ireland as a way of evoking medieval solemnity.

The church was built in 1818, as recorded by Samuel Lewis in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland published in 1837. It stands on the site of an earlier church, suggesting that this particular patch of ground had already served a religious community for some time before the present building went up. The structure follows a fairly conventional plan for its era: a rectangular nave with a chancel at the eastern end, the traditional orientation that places the altar towards Jerusalem. The tower anchors the western end, while the north and south transepts, the short arms that give a church its cruciform shape when viewed from above, were added later, indicating that the congregation or its patrons saw reason to expand the building after its initial construction. Corner buttresses on the nave, chancel, and tower provide both structural reinforcement and a sense of vertical emphasis, and a vestry occupies the north-east corner.