The southeast angle of the structure is the only part of the medieval fabric still legible as standing masonry; the north and west walls have long since collapsed into low, sod-covered mounds barely half a metre high. Even by 1840, when antiquarian Thomas Westropp later consulted earlier accounts for his 1904 to 1905 survey, the church was already reduced to what visitors see today. A correspondent named E. B. Fennessy, writing to a J. Grene Barry, described the old church at that time as "an oblong heap, like that at Milltown", which gives some sense of how comprehensively it had already fallen.

The history of the site stretches back at least to 1291, when Westropp tentatively identified Ballybrood with a reference to the chapel of Bourewode in Wethney. By 1657 it appears in records as Ballybrood parish, and in 1667 it was granted to one J. Maunsell under the Act of Settlement, the post-Cromwellian legal mechanism by which land was redistributed across Ireland. Beside the medieval ruin stands a later Church of Ireland building, itself carrying its own troubled history: built in 1807, burned by the Rockites in 1822, and rebuilt the following year. The Rockites were a rural agrarian movement active in Munster in the early nineteenth century, known for agrarian agitation and attacks on Protestant institutions. That rebuilt church is now also ruinous, making Ballybrood something of a layered site, with two phases of ecclesiastical collapse occupying the same graveyard.

The remains sit in the southern quadrant of the graveyard, south of the later Church of Ireland ruins. What stands of the medieval church amounts to part of the east gable, roughly 3.5 metres high, and two fragments of the south wall. The window embrasure in the east wall, with its splayed ingoings (the angled inner reveals that widen the light entering a narrow opening), is buried under ivy and requires some patience to locate. To the immediate west of the church, a level rectangular area holds numerous uninscribed grave markers, plain stones with no names or dates cut into them. The limestone rubble-core walls that do remain upright are mortared, and the ivy casing them is dense enough that the masonry beneath is easy to mistake for overgrown hedge.