It was admired in 1839 as a work of "considerable size and neatness", and the antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing around the turn of the twentieth century, described it more precisely as having two broad ogee-headed lights beneath a semicircular head, with a north jamb he dated to the late twelfth century. Today the stonework is entirely hidden by growth, which gives the building an odd quality: a ruin that is simultaneously well documented and partly inaccessible, the most celebrated feature present but invisible.

The church sits on a knoll of rock outcrop within a graveyard, itself set inside a wider ecclesiastical enclosure, with low pastureland around it and Muckanagh Lough visible to the south. It was dedicated to St Caoide, the patron saint of the parish, and the OS Letters of 1839 record that his annual festival was celebrated here on the 3rd of March each year. The building is an undifferentiated nave and chancel, meaning the interior runs as a single unbroken space roughly 17 metres long and just over 6 metres wide, without a structural division between the two liturgical zones. The walls are roughly coursed limestone, around 0.76 metres thick, with emphasised quoinstones at the corners. Most stand close to their original height of about 3.8 metres, with one exception: the west wall had already been reduced to a footing by the time the Ordnance Survey recorded it in 1839. A two-storey sacristy or priest's house was added at the east end of the north wall and is still accessed through a plain round-headed doorway. Smaller details survive here and there: a narrow round-headed window in the south wall, a blocked square-headed doorway in the south-east corner, and a shallow wall recess known as an aumbry, used in liturgical practice for storing vessels or sacred objects. Tie-stones on the exterior of the south wall suggest a further structure once stood there, its purpose now unknown. A baptismal font formerly stood in the middle of the church floor; its present location is not recorded.