That detail alone sets the place apart: a medieval church reduced to a garden feature, its gothic stonework serving as a trellis. The enclosure or graveyard that once surrounded it, suggested by the Irish name Teampull-na-Rath, meaning roughly the church of the fort or enclosure, had already disappeared entirely below ground level, leaving the roofless building adrift among vegetable beds and fruit boughs.

The church is attributed by the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, to Edmund Mac Richard Butler, who likely founded it in the mid-fifteenth century. The same patron appears to have built a castle roughly ninety metres to the south, which places this small complex within the pattern of late medieval Anglo-Irish lordship in the region, where a fortified residence and a private church were established close together as paired expressions of status and piety. The building itself is rectangular, measuring twelve metres by seven internally, and constructed from roughly coursed limestone and shale rubble. Carrigan described its features before further deterioration set in: a round-headed south door ornamented with Tudor floral carving, a gothic door in the west gable alongside a two-light gothic window, and a tracery window of two stone mullions in the east gable. Much of this has since collapsed or been robbed, though the segmental-headed west doorway survives to a height of 2.3 metres, and in its north jamb a drawbar socket is still visible, the slot that once held the timber bar securing the door from inside. Traces of wicker-centring, the temporary wickerwork framework used to support an arch during construction, remain on the soffit of the arch above. Internal plaster rendering clings to all four walls, and a small square piscina recess, the stone basin used for washing communion vessels, sits at the east end of the south wall, with a corbel above it. Two further corbels on the north wall interior were probably set to carry roof timbers.