It is full, almost to the height of the surviving walls, with the dead. Generations of burials have accumulated inside the old nave until the grass-covered lintelled graves sit level with the top of the remaining stonework, effectively sealing the doorway in the north wall from the inside and filling what was once the window opening in the west gable. The building has not so much fallen as been quietly absorbed by the graveyard it once served.

The church at Dunquin, on the westernmost tip of the Dingle Peninsula, appears in the Papal Taxation of 1302 to 1306 as the Church of Donetyn, valued at £4. By the early seventeenth century things had gone badly: a Royal Visitation of 1615 found the vicarage 'waste voyde', and by 1756 the antiquarian Charles Smith was recording it plainly as a church in ruins. When the scholar and topographer John O'Donovan surveyed the site in 1841 for the Ordnance Survey, he described a rubble-built rectangle of hard green stone and clay cement, roughly 34 feet long and nearly 14 feet wide, with both gables already destroyed close to their foundations. A lintelled doorway pierced the north wall, a small rectangular window the south. His account noted the font beside the east gable; that carved stone basin, about 26 centimetres across and 15 centimetres deep, was later moved to the vestibule of the modern church built beside the old graveyard around 1857, where it remains in use. Whether it originally belonged to this church or was brought from the nearby ruin at Ballywiheen is not certain. On the exterior of the north wall, near its eastern end, there is a small carved stone showing a figure with raised arms, possibly a crucifixion scene, though it is considered most likely to be modern.

The 1857 church and its car park sit immediately adjacent to the old graveyard, making the site easy enough to reach, about 8.5 kilometres west of Ventry. The view from the graveyard takes in the Blasket Islands, including An Blascaod Mór and the distant outline of Tearaght. Two rough stone crosses elsewhere in the graveyard are among the few features not connected to the later burials. A carved stone set into the surviving north wall, the stepped window in the remaining section of west gable, and the sheer density of graves pressing against the old walls from within are the details that repay a close look.