It is a small footnote in a long chain of demolition and reuse, but the chain itself tells a particular kind of Irish story.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded that a church on Archer's Island in the River Nore was largely pulled down around 1800. The stone was not wasted; it was carted off and incorporated into Ballyconra mill. Mills were practical enterprises, and salvaged dressed stone, already cut and shaped, was simply too useful to leave in a ruin. The mill, in its turn, has also since been demolished, leaving behind only this stray architectural fragment as evidence that the chain of re-use ever happened. The church on Archer's Island presumably predated the mill by centuries, though the notes give no founding date, and the island itself would have lent the original building a degree of seclusion that was common enough for early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, where rivers and their islands sometimes served as natural boundaries for monastic or parish enclosures.