The vaults at St Michan's date from the seventeenth century, and the bodies within them have drawn curious visitors for generations, their leathered skin and exposed features striking an odd balance between the grotesque and the quietly serene. It is a detail that sits uneasily alongside the church's otherwise stately Georgian fabric.

The present building was constructed in 1685 to 1686, though it occupies a site with a much older history. The original foundation dates to around 1197, making this one of the earliest recorded ecclesiastical sites on the north bank of the city. Inside, the church follows a rectangular galleried plan, entered through a classical doorway on the west front, with a stair turret rising at the north-east angle and two round-headed windows admitting light from the north wall. Embedded in the south wall of the chancel is a coffin-shaped stone slab carved with the effigy of a bishop, attributed to the thirteenth century, a rare survival that predates the standing building by several hundred years. The churchyard holds seven seventeenth-century memorials, recorded with reasonable precision: John Steel, commemorated 1654; John Hore, 1662; James Luttrell, 1667; Barth Hadsor, 1669; Robert and Elizabeth Johnson, 1670; and Robert Tighe, 1673, whose monument is set into the west wall of the south transept rather than the open ground. Alexander Johnson's memorial, dated 1692, completes the named set, alongside one unidentified fragment.

St Michan's sits on Church Street in Dublin's north inner city, and the parish church is still in active use. Tours of the vaults are available and allow visitors to descend into the low stone chambers where the mummified remains lie in open or partially open coffins. It is worth noting that access to the vaults is managed and numbers are typically small, so arriving with some patience is sensible. The medieval bishop's effigy in the chancel is easy to overlook in the dim interior, set low in the wall without particular fanfare, but it repays a closer look as one of the older carved stone figures surviving in a Dublin church context.