The walls have long since collapsed to grass-covered foundations, rising only about half a metre above ground level and spanning roughly eighteen and a half metres from east to west. Inside those low ridges, a bullaun stone survives, a naturally occurring or worked granite boulder into which a shallow basin has been ground, probably used for collecting water regarded as having sacred or healing properties. This one measures just under a metre in length, with an oval hollow roughly half a metre across and sixteen centimetres deep. It is a small, quiet thing sitting in a roofless outline of a building that most people would walk past without knowing what it once was.

The church belonged to the world of Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian house founded on the Wexford coast in the early thirteenth century and lying about one and a half kilometres to the west-northwest. The settlement at Saintkierans appears to have been a grange, meaning an outfarm or estate farm attached to a monastic house, where agricultural work was organised under the abbey's authority. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1540, the village was recorded among the possessions of Tintern, and by 1552 the church itself was listed as a chapel of the abbey. A chapel-of-ease, as the designation implies, was a secondary place of worship built to serve a local community that could not easily travel to a parish church. No burials have been identified within the site and there is no trace of a surrounding enclosure, which is slightly unusual for a church of this period. Just to the south, two low parallel earthen banks about six and a half metres apart run east to west for roughly thirty metres, the remains of an old trackway that once led to or from the building.