The ruin, known as Templemaraha, is not a remote field monument requiring map and wellies, but a stone presence at the edge of everyday parish life, with Port Hill rising to the south and the surrounding flat ground giving the whole site an exposed, unhurried quality.

The church dates to the late fifteenth century and was built to a solid rectangular plan, roughly seventeen metres east to west and six metres north to south, with walls a metre thick and constructed of well-coursed limestone blocks with dressed quoins, the precisely cut corner stones that give a building its structural discipline. The walls are base battered, meaning they splay slightly outward at the base to increase stability, a detail that suggests some care in the original construction. The south wall retains a pointed doorway with a hanging eye, the stone socket into which a wooden door pivot would have turned, and the east gable preserves a two-light ogee-headed window, its elegant curved tracery still legible despite the loss of the central mullion. At near ground level in the same gable sits an aumbry, a small recessed cupboard once used to store sacred vessels. A later chapel, built with noticeably rougher stonework, was added to the south-west of the original structure and partly obscures the main doorway. Against its north wall is a wall monument to Donogh O'Kerine, dated 1688, and the interior of the church contains a scatter of seventeenth-century graveslabs, some bearing incised ringed crosses and others with crosses in high relief. To the north of the church, a substantial mausoleum was constructed for the O'Loghlen family of north Clare, adding yet another layer to what is already a dense accumulation of the commemorated dead.

Because Templemaraha is a national monument in State care, the site is accessible, and its position beside the modern church in Ruan means it is straightforward to find. The graveslabs lying recumbent within the roofless walls reward a close look; the variation between incised and relief decoration is easy to distinguish once you are standing among them, and the surviving east window, even without its mullion, gives a clear sense of the quality the original builders were aiming for.