The rectangular limestone building in the Aille River valley in County Clare sits in flat pastureland, its two gables still rising to their original height and the north wall largely intact, while the south wall leans outward at a precarious angle and the east half of it has almost entirely gone. What looks like a simple nave is actually divided by an internal wall that stands to an estimated 6.5 metres, with the silhouette of a belfry visible at its apex through the ivy. That division has long been interpreted as a later addition, a so-called priest's room tacked onto the west end, but the dividing wall was not keyed into the north and south walls at all, which suggests the opposite: that the nave was originally longer, and the internal partition was inserted afterwards rather than built as an extension.

The church was perhaps built around 1430, according to the antiquarian T. J. Westropp writing at the turn of the twentieth century, and was dedicated to St Brecan. The fabric is random-coursed mortared limestone with a rubble core and stressed quoinstones at the corners. The east gable contains the upper portion of an ogee-headed window, a late medieval form with a curved, pointed arch and carved spandrels in the angles; its lower section was still in place when a visitor recorded it in 1992, though it has since deteriorated further. The western section of the building had two floors: two ground-floor chambers, probably for the priest's use, one of which retains a small aumbry, a recessed wall-cupboard used for storing liturgical vessels, near the west end of the north wall. A pointed arched doorway connecting the nave to the south-west chamber preserves a spudstone hinge socket on the sill. Corbels along the upper inner faces of the walls once supported either rafter joists or a balcony or choir. The levelled graveyard adjoins the church, and a holy well formerly stood about 45 metres to the east-south-east. In 1941, workmen digging some 12 metres north of the Aille River and south-west of the church turned up a penannular brooch with zoomorphic terminals, a stone ring, a copper coin, and two boar tusks, a small cluster of finds that hints at activity in the valley predating the church itself by some considerable period.