The side walls have collapsed to foundation level, leaving only the gables standing to their original height, and a later cemetery has spread out to the west of the original oval graveyard. Yet the site carries a quiet significance that its present condition does little to advertise. It sits near the foot of the Dublin Mountains on the outskirts of Templeogue village, and running along the southern edge of its graveyard was once the medieval watercourse that supplied Dublin city with fresh water, a piece of civic infrastructure that few visitors would think to associate with a ruined chapel on the suburban fringe.

The chapel appears by name in the Crede Mihi, a list of churches belonging to the Diocese of Dublin compiled in 1275, though its status within the diocese was always secondary. Around 1531, Archbishop Alen noted that the church of Tachmeloge, as it was then known, was not a parish church in its own right but a chapel annexed to the church of Kilmesantan at Boherbreena, the townland now associated with Boherbreena in the upper Dodder valley. The structure itself was plain and modest: a nave and chancel built of coursed masonry with roughly dressed quoins, the dressed corner stones that give a building its angles, and simple window jambs. The interior measured just under sixteen metres in length and six metres wide, with walls nearly a metre thick. A plain window in the east gable provided the only interior light, and the entrance was cut into the west gable, as was conventional in early church design.

By 1905, Francis Elrington Ball recorded that no visible remains stood above ground at all, which makes the present survival of the gables something of a quiet reversal of that judgement, or at least a partial one. The site sits within an oval graveyard, a shape that often indicates early ecclesiastical enclosures of considerable age, predating the rectangular churchyard layouts that became standard in later centuries. The later cemetery to the west is still in use. Visitors approaching from the village should look for the graveyard boundary as much as the ruins themselves, and bear in mind that the southern edge of the plot once carried water towards a city that has since grown to entirely surround it.