The church was built in a relatively unified campaign between about 1230 and 1250, though the upper stages of the tower and its elaborate portal were added nearer the mid-14th century, attributed to a craftsman known as "Egypticus". Foundations of an earlier church have been found beneath the floor, and a carved sacrament niche and an 1100s gravestone of a priest named Nicolaus, now set into the exterior of the north portal, survive from this earlier building.
The most celebrated medieval features are the stained-glass windows, made in the 1240s in a German-Byzantine style. Several panels, including scenes of the Ascension, Christ in Majesty, the Kiss of Judas, the Flagellation, the Carrying of the Cross and Saint Margaret in the north chancel window, are original; the north window is said to contain the oldest surviving stained glass on Gotland. Other panels are 19th-century additions made to complete the scheme. Wall paintings on the south and south-east walls, dating from the mid-14th century and attributed to the so-called Egypticus workshop, depict the Deposition from the Cross, Michael's fight with the dragon, and the weighing of Emperor Henry II's soul, a subject also found at Vamlingbo church.
Furnishings include a limestone font of mussel-shaped bowl type from around the mid-13th century, a 14th-century retable, a processional crucifix from the first half of the 14th century, and an oak pulpit carved in 1637. A stately choir stall dating to the 14th century was altered in the 17th century and again during later restoration work. In the tower hangs a bell cast in 1599, weighing some 690 kilograms.
By the early 20th century the church had become widely known following an extensive and costly restoration carried out between 1899 and 1914, drawing visitors from far afield. The scheme was planned by the Gotland-born architect and etcher Axel Herman Hägg, who also designed the new wall paintings, with the practical restoration and painting work carried out by the Gotland-born conservator C.W. Pettersson. The intention had been to return the medieval church to its original appearance, but the result was, in effect, a transformation rather than a restoration. Attitudes to church conservation were already changing by the time the work finished, and the interior is now regarded as a striking record of the ambitious but since-questioned restoration philosophy of the late 19th century.
The organ was built in 1875 by Åkerman & Lund of Stockholm and remains mechanical in action; it was renovated in 1985 by a Danish organ-building firm, which restored an earlier disposition altered over the years.