What makes it quietly strange is the eastern gable, which has been entirely replaced by a neo-Romanesque doorway, the rounded-arch style that borrowed heavily from early medieval ecclesiastical architecture and enjoyed a revival in the nineteenth century, opening into a large vault belonging to the Earls of Bantry. The effect is incongruous: a modest rectangular ruin with a grand dynastic entrance grafted onto one end, as though two entirely different buildings have been spliced together across the centuries.

The church measures just under twenty-two metres from east to west and roughly eight metres across, a fairly compact structure with a central doorway in the west gable, an oculus, a small circular window, set above it, and a bellcot, a small turret designed to hold a bell, topping the gable. Seven windows in total, four in the south wall and three in the north, are now blocked. By 1749 the building was described as a "decent parish church", a modest endorsement that nonetheless suggests it was functioning respectably at that point. That changed in 1818, when a new church was built to replace it, leaving this one to slip into ruin. The vault added by the Earls of Bantry, the prominent Anglo-Irish family whose seat was nearby Bantry House, transformed the eastern end from a working gable into a private mausoleum entrance, which accounts for the architectural oddity visible today.