When Ordnance Survey officers visited Mallardstown Great in 1839, they found that the man on whose land the old church stood had just finished pulling up the last stones of its foundation. What they described in their letters was a small building known to locals as Teampall Geal, the White Church, measuring roughly thirty-six feet in length. The graveyard beside it was still in use. The church itself, for practical purposes, had ceased to exist.

Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded that the church had been dedicated to St James the Apostle, whose feast falls on 25 July, and noted that the east gable was still standing to a height of about four feet. Everything else had been uprooted from its foundations. What survives today on a south-facing slope in County Kilkenny, with open views to the south-west and north-east, amounts to wall-footings of roughly coursed limestone rubble, the east and west gables and their short returns, and a portion of the north wall at its eastern end. The whole is buried under accumulated earth and collapsed stone, with a maximum visible height of around 1.2 metres. The interior dimensions, where they can be traced, run approximately fourteen metres east to west and seven metres north to south, placing it in the southwest corner of the graveyard that continues to occupy the site.

What makes this place quietly odd is the layered quality of its disappearance. The 1839 account captures a moment of destruction in real time, the surveyors arriving just days too late to see even the foundations intact. Carrigan arrived sixty-odd years later to find a remnant that has since sunk further still into the ground. The graveyard, meanwhile, has outlasted the building it once belonged to, still in use long after the church that gave it purpose was hauled away stone by stone.