The north and south elevations are effectively gone, reduced to ground level. The east gable survives only in its lower central portion. But the west gable, built of uncoursed rubble limestone bedded in lime mortar and braced by those two buttresses, still stands to nearly its full height, and its flat window lintel, a single central light with a splayed embrasure, remains in place. The church measures roughly 15.5 metres in length by 5.3 metres in breadth internally, a long, narrow oblong typical of medieval parish churches, and its interior now holds three dilapidated tombs and a single grave setting, all heavily overgrown. No evidence of an entrance doorway survives.

The documentary record around this church is unusually lively for a building of its modest scale. A papal taxation of 1302 valued the church, then recorded as 'Novchonwale', at £1 per annum within the Deanery of Hacnye in the Diocese of Ardfert, suggesting it was already an established parish church by the early fourteenth century. The advowson, meaning the right to appoint clergy to the living, was held by the Earl of Desmond, which placed the church within the orbit of one of the most powerful Hiberno-Norman dynasties in Munster. Then in 1476 came a complaint to Rome of a rather different register: one John Machonnchur formally accused David Oryede, the perpetual vicar of Nohaval, of alienating the goods of the vicarage and of being, in the language of the papal letter, a notorious fornicator. The pope ruled that if the accusations proved true, Oryede was to be deprived of the living and Machonnchur installed in his place, the combined value of the vicarage and rectory not exceeding seven marks sterling. By 1615, the Royal Visitation of the Diocese of Ardfert reported more placidly that both church and chancel were well, with a minister named John Gearrott in place.

John O'Donovan, the nineteenth-century scholar and toponymist who worked on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, recorded the church in 1841 and noted that the side walls were nearly destroyed while a part of the east gable and nearly the entire west gable were still standing, the east window so heavily veiled in ivy that its dimensions could not be determined. That ivy-covered window is now largely robbed out, its dressed and chamfered side stones stripped away, but the condition O'Donovan described has not changed dramatically in the intervening 180 years, which is itself a strange kind of testament to the durability of slow collapse.