The gable stands at the northern edge of an oval graveyard, a shape that is itself telling: oval or roughly circular enclosures of this kind tend to mark early medieval ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, their curved boundaries often predating the more regular geometry of later church planning. Here, the early nineteenth-century wall that now defines the perimeter was quite possibly laid on top of just such an older enclosure, preserving an ancient outline without anyone necessarily intending to.

The church's connection to St Ernin is recorded by the scholar M. V. Ronan, writing in 1928. Ernin is an obscure figure, one of many local saints whose cults left a church dedication and little else to mark their presence. Beside the surviving gable, a granite font remains in situ, a functional object from the life of the old congregation now sitting quietly in the open air. Along the enclosure wall, a number of eighteenth-century headstones have been lifted and re-erected rather than left to sink into the ground, which gives the graveyard an slightly assembled quality, as though someone has been trying to hold things together against the gradual loosening that time brings to small rural burial grounds. The site sits on level ground, but the land falls away sharply to the south-west, so the church once occupied a position with a pronounced sense of elevation and exposure.