The west gable still stands to something close to its full height, and set into it are two doors, one directly above the other, suggesting the building once had a gallery or internal loft, with each level reached by its own entrance. Above those doors, the stump of a bellcote survives. The interior, plastered thickly on its remaining walls, is now deep in elder and nettles, and where the east end of the nave and chancel once stood, the ground is occupied by a series of 18th and 19th century burial vaults, one of them a formal classical limestone mausoleum. The chancel itself, likely the oldest part of the structure, has been reduced to overgrown footings. A flat limestone slab in the north-west corner carries the date 1705.

The settlement here appears in the record as Novo Castro as early as 1291, and the historian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, traced a long and interrupted ecclesiastical history for it. A church on the site was destroyed in war in 1302, and the dedication to St. David was formally recorded on 1 March 1410. By 1615 it was noted as being in good condition. The antiquarian John O'Donovan, surveying the area in the 19th century, judged the standing ruin to be no more than 150 years old, placing its construction in the late 17th century, and this remains the most plausible reading. It was a Church of Ireland building, superseded in 1777 when a new church was built on a different site by W., Viscount Courtenay, who granted the ground. Whether the core of the older structure incorporates any late-medieval fabric is uncertain; its position outside the medieval town walls makes a medieval origin less likely, though it cannot be entirely ruled out.

The ruin sits within a rectangular graveyard on high ground, and the burial vaults that now occupy its eastern portion give the whole enclosure an unusually layered character, the living building having been gradually replaced by the dead it once served. The remains of a gabled porch can be seen against the outside of the west gable. Ivy covers much of the stonework, and the interior is not easy going underfoot. The site is near St. David's Well, which Westropp also noted in connection with this locality. Visitors should expect a ruin in an advanced state of decay; the south wall survives only as a few low courses, and much of what the building once was has to be inferred from what little the west end still shows.