The ruins are not simply old; they are layered, one building absorbed into another, so that the eastern end and much of the north wall belong to an earlier structure while the west gable and most of the south wall represent a later rebuilding. The physical join between the two phases is still visible near the east end of the south wall, where the older, thicker masonry, roughly 6.95 metres wide, is overlaid by the newer, narrower wall at around 0.6 metres. It is the kind of detail that rewards close attention.

The earlier church survives only modestly. Its walls barely clear foundation level for most of their length, rising to about 2.5 metres in the south-east corner and just one metre along a mid-section of the north wall, enough to preserve the southern side of a central window opening in the east wall. The later construction is more substantial; the west gable stands to nearly full height and carries a tall pointed window opening, with three similar openings along the south wall, all of them consistent with eighteenth-century work. This later phase has a strange history. The church was recorded as being in ruins in 1615, and again in 1774 by Brady, yet a gravestone found inside the building carries the date 1807. The most plausible reading is that sometime in the early eighteenth century the church was rebuilt, or at least substantially repaired, but that it fell out of regular use again fairly quickly, leaving the 1807 stone as a quiet anomaly inside a structure that had already been abandoned once more. A building reported ruined, rebuilt, briefly used, and ruined again within the span of two centuries carries a particular kind of weight.