The ruin they were documenting sat on a low ridge in County Kilkenny, centrally placed within a small rectangular graveyard, and it was known locally as Teampall Beal Barr, a name that Carrigan, writing in 1905, translated as meaning something like "the gap or opening in the hill."

The church is thought to date from the ninth century, a period when Irish ecclesiastical architecture favoured modest rectangular forms built in mortared stone, sometimes with the kind of carefully dressed window openings recorded here. The 1839 description is unusually precise: round-headed windows in both the east and west gables, a south doorway twelve feet from the west gable, an opposing doorway in the north wall, and brown grit stone used for the cut dressings around the openings. That specificity is itself significant, because by the time Carrigan revisited the site sixty-six years later, he found the features broken and their details largely destroyed. The walls were still substantial, built from very large stones, but what the earlier surveyors had measured with such care had continued to deteriorate. The church does not stand alone in the landscape. Annamult Castle lies roughly 450 metres to the north-west, and a medieval barn sits about 380 metres to the west-north-west, so the ruin forms part of a cluster of medieval remains rather than an isolated fragment.