It is the kind of site that rewards a careful second look: what appears at first to be a random arrangement of old stone turns out to be the remnants of a building with measurable rooms and a documented history stretching back at least four centuries.

This was the parish church of Balscadden, built in coursed limestone masonry and oriented on a roughly north-north-east to west-south-west axis, a slight deviation from the more conventional east-west alignment common to medieval Irish churches. The nave measured around twenty metres in length internally, the chancel nine metres, and the walls were a substantial eighty centimetres thick throughout. A record from 1630 describes the building as being in good repair, which makes its subsequent decline all the more abrupt; by 1887, when Walsh noted it in print, it had already fallen to ruin. By the time surveyors returned in 2010, even the grass-covered foundations of the nave and chancel that had been recorded in an earlier 1992 inspection were no longer clearly readable on the ground. What remained were three corner fragments: the north-west corner, the tallest at three metres, which has since been stabilised and repaired, and two lower corners to the north-east and south-east, the latter pair incorporated with stone and cement into the enclosure of the Dunne family plot. A holy well lies a short distance to the south-south-west of the church, and the attached graveyard remains in use.

The site sits at a roadside elevated position west of Tobertown village in north County Dublin and is accessible on foot. The surviving masonry is modest, and without some foreknowledge of what to look for it is easy to read the Dunne plot boundaries simply as a grave enclosure rather than as reused medieval stonework. The holy well nearby, recorded separately in the national monuments register, is worth seeking out as a companion feature on any visit.