That alone gives the building an unusual character: a Catholic church, constructed during a period of severe legal restrictions on Catholic worship in Ireland, paid for entirely by a Protestant aristocrat as a practical provision for the people who worked his land. The church sits on level ground at the lower eastern end of the Rathborney valley in County Clare, just eleven metres from a ringfort, one of those circular earthwork enclosures that dot the Irish countryside as remnants of early medieval settlement. The proximity of those two structures, separated by roughly a thousand years, gives the site a quietly layered quality.

The building itself is T-shaped, with a nave running east to west and a transept crossing it at the eastern end, giving the floor plan its distinctive form. The walls are stone-built, though brick appears around the window openings, a practical material choice that was common when skilled stone dressing was costly. The windows in the south wall are blocked up now, and those in the north are largely broken out, so the interior would have read differently when the church was in regular use. A subrectangular stoup, a small basin for holy water, is set into the wall just inside the porch door, and the porch itself, with its polished limestone jambs, was added as a separate structure; its walls are not bonded to those of the nave, suggesting it came later. The transept has large pointed windows in its north and south gables, a Gothic touch that sits alongside the round-headed doorway into the nave. A sacristy occupies the eastern exterior, entered from within the church by a lintelled doorway. The church remained in use until around 1860, after which it was abandoned.