What makes it quietly anomalous is its origin: this was not a parish church or a monastery of the major mendicant orders, but a house of the Franciscan Third Order, a branch of the Franciscan family whose members typically lived in the world rather than behind cloister walls, though they sometimes established communal houses of this kind. Founded in 1442, according to Gwynn and Hadcock's authoritative survey of medieval religious houses in Ireland, the building at Templebally sits at a curious intersection of the institutional and the informal.

The standing remains measure more than 19 metres in length and just under 7 metres wide, oriented roughly east to west in the manner of a medieval church or chapel. The east gable survives along with substantial sections of the north wall, while the south wall is reduced to foundations and the west gable has vanished entirely. A roughly built rectangular-headed doorway sits towards the eastern end of the north wall, and the east gable retains a damaged pointed arch window of two lights with trefoiled heads, a decorative form common in late medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture in which the top of each window opening is shaped into a three-lobed clover outline. Perhaps the most telling detail is structural rather than decorative: a thin skin of masonry, just 0.2 metres wide, was added to the inner faces of both the north and south walls at the western end of the building, rising to about 3 metres on the north side. This internal lining was almost certainly intended to carry a timber floor for a second storey, suggesting the western portion of the building once functioned as a domestic or residential space. Within a few hundred metres of the ruin lie further remains: a burial ground to the south-east and a separate church known as Templemoyle Church to the south, pointing to a cluster of religious activity in this otherwise unremarkable stretch of farmland.