At Kilkinure in County Mayo, nineteenth-century graves have crept over the line of the collapsed north wall, and more recent burials press against the outer face of the south wall, so that the boundary between building and graveyard has all but dissolved. What remains of the structure sits on a low knoll with a steep drop to the west and north-west, the kind of slight elevation that medieval builders favoured for visibility and drainage, and which gives even a ruin a quiet sense of presence.

The church probably dates to the fifteenth or sixteenth century and appears under its current name on Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 and 1919, suggesting it was already a recognised landmark by the time systematic mapping reached this part of Mayo. It is a rectangular building, roughly eighteen metres east to west and seven metres north to south, with walls about a metre thick built from mortared, random sandstone rubble. Large squarish blocks are set among horizontally laid slabs, a construction method that gives the masonry a slightly layered quality. The west wall is the most complete, standing to over three metres on its external face. The north-east angle also survives to about three metres, while much of the south and east walls has reduced to footings, one corner reinforced, incongruously, by the root mass of a tree stump. No windows or doorways remain identifiable. Inside the west wall, a row of five putlog-holes sits about a metre above ground level; these are the sockets that once held the horizontal timbers of a builder's scaffold, left open in the masonry when the poles were removed. Near the east end of the vanished north wall there is a small slab-lined recess, roughly sixty centimetres high and less than half a metre deep, whose original purpose is not recorded. The interior is uneven, thick with rubble and grave markers, the whole space compressed by centuries of use layered one on top of another.