The site's Latin name, Sancto Bosco, translates as Holy Wood, and the place carries that layered quality well: a location once thought to have been associated with pagan worship, later Christianised, and then rebuilt and rebuilt again across several centuries until, by 1654, the Civil Survey could record nothing more substantial than 'ye walles of ye parish Church' on the lands of Nicholas Hollywood of Artane.

The name Hollywood here has nothing to do with glamour and everything to do with an Anglo-Norman family who were lords of the manor in 1230. One of their number, John de Hollywood, was born in the townland and went on to become a philosopher, mathematician, and professor in Paris around the same period, a remarkable trajectory from a rural Irish parish. In the early Anglo-Norman period the church was granted to the Priory of Llanthony, a house of Augustinian canons with connections to several Irish properties. By 1615, the Royal Visitation of Dublin noted a vicar, Edward Corbet, and a curate, Terence Ivers, serving the parish, with the church valued at 20 marks. Fifteen years later, Archbishop Bulkeley's Visitation found the church and chancel ruinous, with just eight persons attending divine service. The site appears to have seen some later activity, however: a silver paten now held at Naul church carries the inscription 'Holy Wood, 1754', suggesting the building was at least partially in use well into the eighteenth century.

What survives today is the rectangular limestone nave, nearly twenty metres long internally, with dressed quoins and opposing pointed doorways that retain double draw-bar holes, the slots cut to receive the heavy timber bars used to secure the doors. The chancel to the east has been reduced to foundations, visible mainly as a raised area of ground. A 15th-century holy water stoup, reset in cement, sits to the east of the south doorway, and a blocked chancel arch can still be traced in the masonry. The church sits within a still-active graveyard, so access is straightforward, but the hollow in which it sits means the west gable and its bell-cote tend to appear quite suddenly as you descend towards it, much as the 1887 account described: 'In a sudden deep hollow on the S.W. slope of the high land, stand the walls of the church.'