The round-headed ope at the eastern end of the south wall, the pointed lancet in the east gable, and a roughly constructed two-stone embrasure head in the centre of the same wall seem to belong to slightly different moments in time, as though the building was adjusted and reconsidered across generations. The antiquary Thomas Westropp, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, placed the church at around 1080 AD based on the window styles, while noting that the angular two-stone embrasure head might push the date even earlier. Few modest rural ruins carry that kind of layered ambiguity so visibly in their fabric.

Once known as Maley's or O'Maley's church, the building takes its current name from the Templemaley parish it served. It is oriented east to west, as was standard for Christian worship, and measures just over fifteen and a half metres internally along that axis. The walls, built with roughly coursed stone faces and a rubble core, survive almost in their entirety; the south wall still stands 3.4 metres high in places, supported at the east gable by sloping buttresses. The doorway in the south wall retains a chamfered pointed arch and a hanging eye, the stone socket that once held the door pivot, giving a quiet sense of how the building functioned as a working space. Inside at the south end of the east wall there is a small aumbry, a shallow recess in the wall used to store liturgical vessels, plain and undecorated. A cutting made for the River Fergus now runs about 200 metres to the east and north of the church, and this channel has had an unexpected archaeological consequence: it separates the graveyard from a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of early medieval origin, on the far side of a nearby bridge to the northwest. The two features may be broadly contemporary, though the relationship remains uncertain.