Two of its walls still reach their original height, the west gable and the north wall rising intact while much of the south and east walls have been worn or reduced to little more than a metre. What makes the building particularly telling is the way different eras have left their marks almost side by side: the lower jambs of a finely worked doorway with a deep chamfer on the outer edge survive in the south wall, while directly opposite in the north wall a later doorway was punched through and fitted with brick surrounds, a practical intervention that sits awkwardly against the older stonework. The interior was plastered, and in time the east half of the building was divided into two burial plots by the nineteenth century, the church by then serving the dead rather than the living. Leaning against the outside of the west gable is a further ruined structure, gabled and overgrown, enclosing a railed nineteenth-century grave plot of its own.

The church served as the parish church of Little Island, and contemporary accounts show it functioning well into the early modern period. A visitation record from 1615 and again from 1639 found it in repair, and a description from 1700 gives an unusually precise picture: the building was of stone and lime, in good condition, fitted with a pulpit and desks but no seats, and contained a tomb belonging to the Courthy family. The church measured roughly forty feet by twenty, which corresponds closely to the dimensions that survive on the ground today. It appears to have fallen out of regular use around 1769, when the parish was united with Cahirlag. By 1923, a writer named Power could still describe the walls as standing to their original height and noted the pointed doorway of cut stone in the south wall, along with pointed windows in the south and east walls that had at some point been modernised, presumably fitted with those brick surrounds still visible in the fabric today. The building is, in other words, a late medieval core that was patched and adapted rather than replaced, its bones still legible beneath the repairs.