The site sits just 200 metres west of the Dublin coastline, roughly 720 metres south of Skerries, and its layered ecclesiastical remains span somewhere between the thirteenth century and the nineteenth, each era leaving something behind while partly dismantling what came before. What you see today is an accumulation rather than a single building: a nineteenth-century Church of Ireland structure to the north of the graveyard, an eighteenth-century bell-tower rising from the footprint of a medieval priory, and a graveyard wall that may itself contain stonework recycled from an earlier church.

The oldest institutional layer here is a thirteenth-century Augustinian priory, an Augustinian house being a community of canons following the Rule of St Augustine, which also served as the parish church for the surrounding area. By 1540, when jurors reported to the crown, the priory church had been functioning as a parish church for as long as anyone could remember. The same survey recorded a substantial estate: around 1,000 acres, a water-mill, numerous cottages and messuages, and a rectory valued at £69 8s. 6d. By 1548 the tenants, including the executors of one Robert Cowley and a man named John Parker, were over £119 in arrears, and the property was eventually granted to Thomas Fitz Wiliams in 1578. A century later, the 1654 to 1656 Civil Survey of Dublin found the parish in the hands of the Lord of Thomond of Bunratty, and recorded simply that the walls of the parish church still stood. The Hamilton family of Hackettown acquired the Holmpatrick estate from the Earls of Thomond in 1720 and built a new church within two years, the bell-tower of which survives on the priory site.

The site lies close to the coast road south of Skerries, and the graveyard is accessible on foot. The upper graveyard wall is worth examining closely; fragments of the eighteenth-century church fabric are thought to have been worked into its fabric, making the boundary wall itself a kind of informal archive. St Patrick's Island, the Inis Pádraig referenced in the older placename, lies 2.1 kilometres to the north-east and is visible from the shoreline nearby, offering a useful reminder of the maritime and devotional geography that once made this a significant location along the north Dublin coast.