By the time a writer named Robertson examined it in the early 1870s, the mullions and jambs of the doors and windows had already gone, and the stonework had been so repeatedly coated in render that the original masonry was buried beneath layer upon layer of dashing. Only in one or two places, he noted, did the old stone manage to show through. The walls, at least, still spoke for themselves.

The church stands roughly ninety metres north-northeast of a motte, the raised earthen mound that was the foundation of a Norman defensive structure, which suggests this corner of County Kilkenny was a place of some consequence in the medieval period. Inside the ruin, Robertson also recorded the presence of a medieval font, the stone basin used for baptismal water, which implies the building had a long liturgical life before it fell out of use. A late seventeenth-century memorial, possibly a headstone, was later noted by Cockerham in 2009, associated either with the church itself or with the graveyard that adjoined it. That small cluster of objects, a font, a headstone, walls plastered over and then quietly crumbling, traces a span of several centuries of use compressed into what is now a field.