Running along both the north and south walls is a series of tall, bluntly pointed blank arches, a form of decorative internal arcading in which shallow recessed bays are separated by plain stone piers. It is not a common arrangement, and here it has been put to various subsequent uses: one bay on the north wall was blocked up at some point in the eighteenth or nineteenth century to accommodate a mural plaque, the base of which is still visible; a chest tomb has been pushed against another. The arches served the living as much as the dead, with windows and a doorway set into the rear walls of the recesses rather than through the main fabric of the church. A cut-stone fragment outside the south wall, the sill of a window light with a central mullion, hints at what has been lost from the upper sections.

This is the parish church of Bruhenny, and its history is one of gradual decline clearly documented at specific moments. A church on this site was listed in the Papal Taxation of 1291, establishing it as a medieval foundation of some standing. By 1615 a visitor's report noted the nave still in repair but the chancel already in ruins; by 1694 the whole had been abandoned. The chancel is now little more than a slightly raised, overgrown platform, and the chancel arch, a low pointed structure with narrow uncut voussoirs, survives only as a mound of rubble, though a photograph taken by the antiquarian Grove White around 1906 preserves its form. The nave fares better: the east half of the north wall still stands to around four metres, and parts of three arches on each side wall remain. One of the chest tombs in the nave dates to 1722, placed here after the church had already been disused for a generation, which was not unusual in Ireland where ruined ecclesiastical enclosures continued to serve as burial grounds long after the building itself had ceased to function.