What makes Magherareagh worth a second look is the quiet accumulation of things occupying it: the ivy-covered shell of a medieval church, a carved stone head tucked beside a doorway, centuries of headstones, and, just to the east, the earthen mound of a motte, the raised platform of a Norman fortification, sitting close enough to suggest that whoever controlled this landscape in the Middle Ages wanted both spiritual and military authority visible from the same patch of ground.

The church itself is a simple rectangular structure built from roughly coursed limestone rubble, now poorly preserved and heavily cloaked in ivy. Its most compelling detail is the doorway set into the western end of the south wall: a round-arched opening with punch-dressed chamfered stonework, beside which sits a carved head that appears to have served as the terminal for a hood-moulding, the projecting stone trim above an arch that channels rainwater away from the opening. Carved heads used in this way are not uncommon in Irish Romanesque and later medieval churches, though they are rarely the first thing a visitor expects to find half-hidden in vegetation. The site was significant enough to be recorded in the ecclesiastical taxation of the Diocese of Cashel in 1302, a papal survey of church properties that placed it within a formal administrative and religious network reaching back to Cashel. A nearby motte reinforces the sense that this corner of Tipperary was actively organised during the medieval period, with both Anglo-Norman secular power and church infrastructure operating in close proximity.

The graveyard surrounding the church remains in use in the historical record through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with headstones from both periods still visible. The whole site is enclosed by a nineteenth-century stone wall, which gives it a tidier boundary than its ruined interior might suggest.