Teampall na nGrífín, the church of the Griffins, belongs to a family who once held territory stretching from Ballyheigue to Ardfert, and the connection is not merely nominal. A single carved stone on the internal east jamb shows interlaced wyverns biting each other's tails above a plaited pattern, a piece of decorative stonework that the antiquary Charles Smith noted in 1756 as depicting "a griffin and a dragon conjoined which some of the family of Fitzmaurice carried formerly as supporters to their arms." It is a small, easily missed detail in a ruined building, but it plants the church firmly in the social world of late medieval Munster.

The church measures 14.5 by 7 metres internally, a modest single-aisled structure built mostly of roughly coursed limestone, with red and green sandstone appearing in smaller amounts throughout the fabric. The walls are in reasonable condition by the standards of unroofed medieval ruins; the north and south walls stand to around 4 metres, while the gables reach 8 to 9 metres, with a rectangular bell-cote rising above the west gable. The east wall retains a tall splayed cusped twin-light window with chamfered limestone jambs. The south wall holds a piscina, the small stone basin used for rinsing liturgical vessels during Mass, with a pointed limestone arch and chamfered red sandstone jambs. Between two windows in the south wall, a round-headed splayed doorway opens with red sandstone jambs and a limestone arch. The mix of materials gives the building a quietly patchwork quality, the red sandstone catching the eye against the grey limestone in a way that photographs rarely do justice to. The church sits just 36 metres from Ardfert Cathedral and 7 metres from a Romanesque church, making the graveyard one of the more concentrated assemblages of medieval ecclesiastical remains in the county.