A solitary chestnut tree partially shades it. Were it not for the slight but persistent ridge of that buried wall, and the gap near the western end of the south wall that probably marks where a door once stood, the building would be almost invisible. The townland name, Templepark, carries the word "temple" within it, a common Anglicisation of the Irish "teampall", meaning church, which hints at some older religious significance on this ground.

When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was made in the nineteenth century, the building was still shown as roofed, a small rectangular structure aligned east to west in the conventional orientation of Christian worship. An entry in the OS Letters, those detailed field notes compiled by surveyors in the 1830s, referred to it only as "a templeen", a diminutive suggesting something modest and perhaps already marginal. Local tradition holds that the building was in active use until the early nineteenth century. The more intriguing possibility, raised by its physical relationship to a nearby enclosure, is that it functioned as a pre-emancipation Roman Catholic chapel. Before Catholic Emancipation in 1829, Catholic worship in Ireland was legally constrained for much of the preceding century and a half, and Mass was frequently celebrated in small, plain, unobtrusive structures of exactly this kind. A small almost square enclosure, roughly eleven and a half metres by eleven metres, adjoins the building on its north side, defined by a low bank with what may be an entrance at its north-west corner. Further earthworks and a cairn or burial ground feature are associated nearby, suggesting this was once a more substantial focus of local activity than its present appearance would suggest.