Most early Irish churches survive only as low stumps or scattered rubble, so the walls of this former parish church of Drum Dreastan, brought back to their original height during conservation work carried out between 1987 and 1989, give an unusually clear sense of the building's proper scale and form. Round-headed doorways and windows, including a reconstructed doorway in the south wall and windows in both gables, point to a 12th-century date. Round-headed, or Romanesque, openings were characteristic of Irish ecclesiastical building in that period, and their presence here helps anchor the structure firmly within the medieval landscape of the diocese of Elphin.

The site has accumulated layers over a long period. The medieval church sits at the southern end of a rectangular graveyard, which itself lies within the remnants of a much older oval ecclesiastical enclosure, measuring roughly 170 metres east to west and 140 metres north to south. Such enclosures, defined by curving field banks or walls, are a common feature of early Irish monastic and church sites, often marking a boundary between sacred and secular space. Most of the enclosure's defining banks have been removed here, though a short section survives to the west. Within the same enclosure, roughly 75 metres to the southeast of the medieval church, lies the site of an unclassified castle, and about 110 metres to the northeast is St Bridget's Well. The northern part of the old graveyard also holds the conserved basal courses of a T-shaped Roman Catholic church, a later structure whose transept ran nearly 20 metres east to west. In 2015, M.B. Timoney identified a cross-slab north of the church that had been reused as a grave-marker. On its flat face is an incised cross with expanded terminals set within a moulded frame, the kind of carefully worked early medieval stonework that often turns up in secondary use, its original context long forgotten.