The note is recorded without further elaboration, which somehow makes it more compelling. The ruin sits at the foot of a north-east-facing slope in Templemartin, Co. Kilkenny, forming the northern boundary of an irregularly shaped graveyard, and the building itself carries several centuries of quiet, legible history within its surviving walls.

Tradition held that the church once belonged to the Vicars Choral of St Canice's Cathedral in Kilkenny, and a priest was still saying mass within the ruin on every Saint Martin's Day until around 1809, a practice that speaks to the tenacity of devotion long after a building had ceased to function as a working church. The historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, suggested the structure could be no later than the thirteenth century, and two graveslabs from the thirteenth or fourteenth century found near the south doorway support that estimate. The church was originally a single undivided space, roughly thirteen metres east to west and seven metres north to south, built from roughly coursed limestone rubble with walls around eighty centimetres thick. At some later point the original east gable was broken through and a chancel added; only the lowest courses of that addition survive to about a metre in height. The surviving south wall retains a pointed, chamfered and punch-dressed doorway, the worked stonework indicating some care in the original construction. Two further graveslabs from the sixteenth century lie along the south wall of the chancel, and tucked at the east end of the north wall is a small square limestone holy water stoup, a basin carved to receive blessed water at the church entrance, its circular bowl still recognisable despite being only partially preserved. A nineteenth-century wall memorial now blocks one of the narrow rectangular windows that flank the breach into the chancel, so the interior layers its centuries almost literally on top of one another: medieval fabric, post-medieval adaptation, and Victorian commemoration all within a shell open to the sky.