What makes this particular ruin stranger still is that its own history resists settling into a single agreed version. The rectangular church in Michaelschurch townland, Co. Kilkenny, formerly part of what was recorded as Damma townland, is variously credited to William Smyth, who died in 1655, to his grandson Valentine, who died in 1700, and to Valentine's daughter-in-law Jane Smyth, who died in 1747. Whether these represent successive phases of building, rebuilding, or competing local traditions is not entirely clear. One stone inscription, noted by Holahan in 1883, names John Smyth, who died in 1708 and is buried within the church walls, as its builder. Carrigan, writing in 1905, offers the Valentine and Jane Smyth account instead. The church had an older ecclesiastical life before any of the Smyths were involved; it was mentioned by Archdall as a rectory belonging to Jerpoint Abbey, the Cistercian house some miles to the south.

By the eighteenth century the building was functioning as a Mass-house, a term used for the informal or semi-clandestine Catholic chapels that served communities during the Penal era, and it reportedly served the Ballycallan district in that capacity until towards the end of the 1700s. It appears in Dr. Tennison's Visitation Book of 1731 and was dedicated to St Michael the Archangel, a dedication reflected in the local place name. When Holahan recorded the church in 1883, the roof had already been gone for roughly sixty years. What remained was a western gable standing about four metres high, a broken round-headed window above the doorway, a fragment of belfry, and side walls surviving only to about 1.2 metres, built of small rounded chipped stones just twenty-three inches thick. The northern wall had once been supported by three buttresses. Recesses in the walls still marked where two Smyth family mural entablatures, ornamental commemorative panels, had been removed. A stone plaque that had stood in the south wall near the east gable was by then displaced, and a gable cross, sketched by J. G. Robertson in the early 1860s along with a holy-water stoup, had presumably already left the site.

The pattern, a traditional gathering at a holy site associated with the feast day of its patron saint, was still being observed at Michaelschurch as recently as Holahan's time, celebrated on the Sunday after St Michael's Day, the 29th of September. It is one of those small, persistent local observances that continued long after the fabric of the building had ceased to hold together.