The composition follows a convention of the period, but with an odd social gradient worked into the stone: both of Boyle's wives kneel in the lower register, while Boyle himself and his mother-in-law above him recline in what was then considered the more fashionable, modern pose. It is the kind of object that rewards a second look, where the hierarchy of a life is literally arranged in marble. The church that contains it is itself something of an anomaly, described by the architectural historian Harold Leask as the second largest medieval parish church still standing and in active use in Ireland.

The building on the north side of Youghal town dates in its main fabric to the mid-thirteenth century, raised on the site of an earlier church whose fabric it may partly have absorbed. It is cruciform in plan, with an aisled nave and a tower positioned at the angle where the north aisle meets the transept. The chancel was completely rebuilt in the second half of the fifteenth century, though the masons who did the work were careful to echo what had come before: the lancet windows, arranged in pairs and threes just as they are in the older fabric of around 1250, were deliberately copied in form and size. The east window is more elaborate still, six lights wide and divided by a master mullion that branches left and right around a small rose. In 1579 Desmond's followers damaged the church during the turmoil of the Munster rebellion, yet by 1615 it was recorded as being in good repair. The eighteenth century was less kind; the chancel had become roofless by that point, and it was not until a renovation programme between 1852 and 1857 that the entire structure was re-roofed, with a note from 1860 recording the church as being in perfect order.

Beyond the Boyle monument, the interior holds several medieval pieces worth seeking out. There is an eight-sided baptismal font from the fourteenth century, and a late thirteenth-century effigy that appears to be composite or repaired, its head male and its body female, suggesting either a later alteration or the reuse of separate pieces. Two early fourteenth-century effigies are also present: one for Thomas Paris, set into a wall tomb, and one for Matheu le Mercer, housed beneath a canopy tomb, a niche-like stone structure designed to shelter and frame the figure within.