Walls from different centuries sit uneasily against one another; a chancel is poorly bonded into the nave as though added in a hurry; and stones that were cut for one purpose have clearly been lifted and reset into another position altogether. What survives is fragmentary, but the fragments are eloquent in ways that a tidier ruin rarely is.

The church appears in the Papal Taxation of 1291, which places it firmly within the medieval parish landscape of north Cork. By 1615 it was reported to be in repair, but by 1694 it had been abandoned. The structure itself tells a similarly layered story. The basal courses at the east end of the south wall show Romanesque stonework, suggesting an origin earlier than the documentary record confirms. The door and window surrounds in the south wall of the chancel were dated by the architectural historian Harold Leask to the early thirteenth century, though he concluded they had been lifted and reset in their present positions at a later date. The east window of the chancel, with its double ogee-headed light set into a splayed embrasure, belongs to the fifteenth or sixteenth century and probably marks the moment the chancel itself was added. The south wall of the chancel was heavily rebuilt by the Office of Public Works in 1934, which complicates any reading of what is original. Among the quieter details worth noting is a small inscribed slab resting against the north wall of the nave: roughly 0.9 metres tall, it carries a three-armed segmental cross with fleur-de-lis terminals, consistent with sixteenth-century work. On the south jamb of the chancel arch, the lower limestone courses survive with chamfered edges in a late-medieval style, and a worn carved head has been set on a flat slab atop the jamb. When the antiquary Windele visited in 1851, a gap in the south wall of the nave was already present; a later scholar interpreted it as the site of a thirteenth-century doorway, though Windele himself described it simply as a gap. The west gable has almost entirely disappeared, with grave plots now overlying the line where it once stood.