What survives tells a story of repeated alteration: an original Romanesque fabric modified in the late twelfth century, patched again possibly as late as the seventeenth, and abandoned as a functioning church by 1615 at the latest. The building sits within an enclosed graveyard on a gentle south-facing slope, surrounded by further monuments that suggest this was once a place of considerable ecclesiastical importance.

The church is thought to have been founded as early as the tenth or eleventh century, dedicated to St Mogua, and may be identifiable with a 'New Chapel' that appears in Papal tax records of 1302. It is a substantial structure, nearly thirty metres long, built in cyclopean masonry, a technique using very large, roughly dressed stones that produces walls almost a metre thick. The plan follows the standard arrangement of nave and chancel, separated by a round-headed arch that the antiquary Thomas Westropp, writing in 1909, described as plain but finely built. The chancel arch and the tall east window, whose head was cut from a single stone, belong to the original build, with rounded mouldings still visible on the window jambs. The south doorway is likely a late twelfth-century insertion; above its square head a pointed tympanum carries short bars in a pattern related to the chevron ornament typical of Irish Romanesque architecture. A drawbar-hole survives in the west jamb, a small slot that once held a timber beam drawn across to secure the door from inside. Two wider rectangular windows further along the south wall were probably added in the seventeenth century, their mullion traces indicating one had two lights and the other three. Inside, a rubble mound beneath the east window was identified in the nineteenth century as a broken altar.

The graveyard holds considerably more than the church itself. Within a few metres stand the remains of a possible round tower, a leacht (a low commemorative stone cairn associated with early Irish ecclesiastical sites), and a cross. A later church lies just to the south-east. Beyond the graveyard boundary, a market cross stands to the north-west and a holy well sits about eighty-five metres to the east. A modern church dedicated to Saint Mochua occupies ground close to the west, keeping the dedication alive in a slightly altered form of the saint's name, across what may be more than a thousand years of continuous veneration on the same patch of County Clare.