The building standing there today dates to the eighteenth century, but the ground it sits on is thought to have held a place of worship since the thirteenth, a medieval church of which nothing now survives above the surface, not a wall, not a foundation course, not a carved stone.

The sole record of that earlier building comes from William Carrigan's 1905 history of the diocese of Ossory, a meticulous county-by-county account of Catholic parishes in Kilkenny. Carrigan noted that the first church in the present graveyard was built in the thirteenth century, then immediately conceded that no trace of it remained. It is a curious kind of evidence, an absence confirmed rather than disputed, with no physical archaeology to either support or complicate the claim. The site sits on a rise to the west of the Cloch River, on the valley floor, a position that would have made practical sense for an early medieval foundation, slightly elevated, close to water, visible from the surrounding land. The eighteenth-century church that replaced whatever came before it is still in use, embedded in a graveyard that has presumably accumulated burials across the same long span.