The stonework itself has become a record of a world far older than any parish boundary or ecclesiastical enclosure. That the ivy now covering the same wall makes close examination impossible adds a particular frustration: the fossils are there, documented, but partially withheld.

The church sits on low-lying, poorly drained ground in the townland of Clonkeen, with the Inny River, which marks the county boundary with Longford, running just 350 metres to the north, and the Creggy River a mere 95 metres to the east. The ruin, measuring roughly 11.7 metres east to west and 7.3 metres north to south, stands within an irregular graveyard defined by a post-medieval stone wall. Interestingly, the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the church positioned in the northern quadrant of a roughly oval-shaped enclosure, a shape that may preserve the outline of a much earlier ecclesiastical enclosure. By contrast, the 1659 Down Survey, a seventeenth-century mapping project carried out to record land redistributions after the Cromwellian wars, does not depict a church here at all, even though it records the townland of Clonkeen and notes that its lands were granted in 1653 to a Captain Edmonds. Whether the church predates the survey and was simply omitted, or whether its origins are more complicated, remains unclear. What is recorded is that a section of the south wall was later rebuilt to accommodate a mural tablet for Father Banon, who was buried inside the church in 1831. A nineteenth-century source, Cogan, writing between 1862 and 1867, recorded the chapel's internal dimensions as thirty-three feet by eighteen feet six inches, referring to it then as the chapel of Templeavalley, now Clonkeen.

The church is entered today through a modern gap, off-centre in the south wall, and no trace of the original doorway survives. There are no dressed stones or architectural details remaining in the upstanding fabric, just rubble masonry, ivy, an uneven interior scattered with memorials, and those fossils in the north wall, half-hidden by vegetation. Loghter Castle lies 1.3 kilometres to the northwest, and a possible ringfort sits 340 metres to the north, so the immediate landscape carries its own layered quiet.