The exterior gives little away, but inside the walls still carry faint traces of lime plaster, two medieval graveslabs lie near the south wall, and a baptismal font sits quietly against the north wall of the nave. Around 1920, a 17th-century bronze cross was found hidden within the building, almost certainly concealed for use at clandestine Masses during the Penal era, when Catholic worship was officially suppressed in Ireland. That a congregation continued to gather here, secretly, adds a particular weight to the silence of the place now.

The church was dedicated to St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, and is said to predate the Norman invasion of Ireland, though the architectural fabric visible today points to a 12th or 13th-century date. It sits roughly 600 metres north-east of Blanchville Castle, and by 1289 a man named Richard de Blanchville was serving as its parson. The building's history is layered with ecclesiastical politics: in 1320, Richard de Ledred, Bishop of Ossory, received papal authority to reassign the church after its previous holders, including Peter de Blauncevilla and the Dean of Kilkenny, vacated it having held multiple church livings simultaneously, a practice known as pluralism. The rectory was subsequently appropriated to the Abbey of Jerpoint, the celebrated Cistercian house some miles to the south-west, and by 1396 the abbot of Jerpoint had formally acquired the parish. The church appears on the Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656 already described in the accompanying terrier, a written land description, as showing only "ruinous walls." Hewson, writing in 1893, suggested that the chancel was in fact the original structure, with the nave added later, a reading that would place the building's origins in an even earlier period than its current stonework implies.

The building is constructed of roughly coursed limestone and sandstone rubble, and enough of the fabric survives to read the original layout clearly. The chancel arch, nearly three metres wide, has been broken through but several of its sandstone voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that lock an arch together, remain in place. Each side of the chancel's east gable holds a round-headed window set within a wide splaying embrasure, the two openings meeting at the centre of the wall. A piscina, a small stone basin used for rinsing liturgical vessels, survives at the east end of the south chancel wall, and small aumbries, shallow wall cupboards for storing sacred objects, appear in several locations throughout the nave and chancel. A large 19th-century vault occupies the north-east angle of the chancel, a reminder that burial continued here long after the building itself fell out of use.