Bruera is in SW Cheshire, 4 miles S of the centre of Chester. It is a manor house village consisting only of the church, a moated site immediately to the NW and a few scattered houses nearby. There are traces of ridge-and-furrow cultivation in the surrounding fields.
St Mary's has a 12thc. nave with a shingled W bell-turret, added by W. M. Boden in a restoration of 1896, described by Richards as a "wanton and unnecessarily severe rebuilding of much of the church". There is a 15thc. S chapel off the nave, containing tombs of the Cunliffe family. The chancel has been largely rebuilt, but the S respond of the chancel arch is original with elaborately carved capitals and beakhead on the embrasure. There is a modern vestry on the S side of the chancel. The church contains other Romanesque or earlier material, all re-set. The S nave doorway has chevron voussoirs set above its pointed opening, and two 11thc.-12thc. carved stones on the jamb. Inside, around the rere-arch are a number of panels crudely carved with simple foliage designs, and similar panels are re-set in the interior S nave wall. They may be pre-Conquest. The church is constructed of red sandstone.