It is one of the few legible pieces of a church whose precise origins remain genuinely uncertain, even to those who have studied it most closely. The rubble-built rectangular structure at Kilmurry, measuring 11.2 metres by 6.6 metres externally, has walls reduced largely to their foundations, and the interior is packed with collapsed stonework. What survives above ground tells only part of a complicated story.

The building is believed to be connected to the medieval parish church of Minard, recorded as a 13th-century foundation, though whether the church at Kilmurry was always its location is a matter of debate. One view, advanced by Hickson in 1888, holds that the original foundation stood in the nearby townland of Aglish and was later relocated to Kilmurry. A local tradition recorded in 1848 by Windele complicates this further, placing the construction of the Aglish building as late as the mid-17th century, which would push the whole sequence in a different direction. What is clear is that the church survived in some form into the 16th century and was already in ruins by 1756, when Charles Smith noted it in that condition. As recently as 1841, however, the east gable was described as standing almost intact, lit by a twin-light lancet window, with single-light windows at the east ends of both the north and south walls. Lancet windows of that paired kind are a characteristic feature of later medieval Irish church architecture, admitting narrow shafts of light above the altar end. Within a few decades, even that remnant had collapsed.

The site occupies elevated ground overlooking Minard Bay, immediately beside Minard Castle, the remains of a 16th-century tower house that met its own dramatic end. The entrance through the south wall is still just about traceable among the rubble, and the window head in the adjacent farmyard is worth finding for the quiet oddness of its situation, a piece of ecclesiastical stonework that outlasted the building it once belonged to by ending up somewhere altogether more domestic.