The church occupies the edge of an Iron Age meadow site, where sacrifice springs, sharpening-groove stones and picture stones dating from the 400s have been found. A round Romanesque church was built here in the early 1100s, of which the tower survives intact. As Gothic fashion took hold, the rest of the building was progressively remodelled: a new choir in Early Gothic style was completed in 1236, possibly under the mason Lafrans Botvidsson, and around 1300 a High Gothic nave replaced the older one. Carved stones from the Romanesque building were reused in the new work, which is why animal reliefs and rounded arch friezes from the earlier church can still be seen on the south wall. As elsewhere on Gotland, building work of this kind was halted by the plague of 1350 and the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag's conquest of the island in 1361, after which trade collapsed for generations.
Inside, the church preserves work from many centuries. The font, near the back of the church as it would have stood in medieval times, is unusually elaborate and has a lid shaped like a wooden castle. A triumphal crucifix also survives from the twelfth-century church. Medieval wall and vault paintings cover much of the interior, including a depiction of Christ as ruler of the world and a Passion frieze along the nave walls, though some of this decoration was reworked or "improved" in the late 1600s. A painted screen above the triumphal arch shows Christ flanked by Mary, John the Baptist, Saint Bartholomew and Saint Olof, with two smaller figures at the edges thought to represent the church's donors. The pulpit dates from the late seventeenth century.