What makes Ballymurreen unusual is less any single dramatic feature than the layering of it: the medieval, the post-medieval, and the more recent all pressing up against one another on a modest elevation with open views in every direction.

The church itself, a nave and chancel structure built from roughly coursed limestone rubble, survives in poor condition, though enough remains to read its basic form. A nave and chancel arrangement was the standard plan for a rural parish church in medieval Ireland, with the nave serving the congregation and the chancel reserved for the clergy and altar. By the time of the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a comprehensive land survey carried out under Cromwellian administration, the site was already described simply as a church enclosed by a ditch, suggesting it had already fallen out of active use. The nearby castle site to the east would once have made this a small but coherent local centre, the kind of pairing of church and tower house that recurs across the Irish midlands and south.

The graveyard wall has been restored through a local community scheme, and the enclosed headstones date mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contrast between the eroded medieval fabric of the church and the legible inscriptions on those later stones gives the site an understated continuity, one community burying its dead in a place that had already been sacred ground for several hundred years before them.