The setting is quietly enclosed; rising ground limits the outlook in most directions, opening only to the north-east. The east gable, which once held a small round-arched window described as having its arch "turned with thin flags", meaning thin slabs of stone laid in a curve rather than cut voussoirs, collapsed around 1960. What the ground did not swallow before then, the hawthorn and brambles are steadily reclaiming.

When the historian William Carrigan documented the church in 1905, in the third volume of his history of the Diocese of Ossory, the west gable and most of the north wall had already gone. He noted a breach in the north wall marking where the entrance had once been, and described that small east window, damaged at the sides but still retaining its round arch on the exterior face. The church itself is a rectangular structure, roughly 18 metres east to west and 9.3 metres north to south, built from large blocks of roughly coursed limestone with walls around 0.8 metres thick. Today the only substantial upstanding section is a stretch of the west end of the south wall, standing about 3.3 metres high over a length of 2.5 metres. The rest of the south wall barely clears the grass at around half a metre. The north wall survives to about 1.2 metres but has been breached midway along its length. Approximately 230 metres to the north-west stands Ballynaboley tower house, a reminder that this was once a functioning medieval settlement rather than an isolated fragment.