The limestone fabric, laid in lime-and-sand mortar, still carries ogee-headed windows on the south wall, their narrow openings only around 0.3 metres wide but carefully worked with chamfered surrounds and splayed internal reveals. Inside, a piscina, a small stone basin set into the wall that would have been used for washing the communion vessels, survives in the south-east corner, and recesses cut into the interior walls suggest a building fitted out with some care. The stone quoins at the corners have largely been robbed out over the centuries, leaving the angles vulnerable, and much of the remaining wall surface is now thick with ivy. The graveyard around it, noted in 1841 as unfenced but well frequented, continues in use.

The church's recorded history is long and occasionally turbulent. A papal taxation in 1302 assessed the church, then referred to as 'Mac Inwyr', at 20 shillings per annum. It was administered by the Augustinian canons of Rattoo, an abbey a few miles to the north-west, and the succession of its clergy in the 1430s reads like a small drama of canon law. Cormac O'Connor, holding the vicarage, resigned in 1434 to enter the Augustinian monastery at Rattoo as a canon. His successor, Donatus O'Kennelly, then held the position for over a year without ever being ordained priest, which left the appointment technically void. The matter was resolved in 1435 when a papal letter assigned the vicarage to Dermot O'Scanlon, a canon of Ardfert, who was himself operating under a papal dispensation on account of his illegitimate birth. The same letter noted that mass had not been celebrated at Knockanure for several years. By 1615, however, the Royal Visitation of the Diocese of Ardfert found the church and chancel well slated, with a resident minister named Luke Moris. In 1704 a priest named Godfry Daily was recorded as ministering here, well into the post-Reformation period.

The church sits about three Irish miles east of Listowel, in the townland of Lissaniska, Lios an Uisce, meaning the enclosure of the water. The 1841 Ordnance Survey account noted reddish stones mixed among the black limestone of the walls, their composition uncertain even to the surveyor at the time. The south wall doorway, pointed and built of hammered limestone, still stands to its original height of 1.8 metres, and a concrete ramp added in recent years makes the interior accessible.