Set about 1.2 metres above the present ground level, they are thought to have served either as light openings or as listening posts, places where poorer parishioners who could not afford entry, or were not permitted inside, might stand at the wall and follow the mass by sound alone. It is a detail that sits quietly in the masonry, easy to miss, but difficult to forget once noticed. The church occupies a glen on the north side of a mountain stream, which also marks the old townland boundary with Kilconly South, and the graveyard around it remains in use.

The place takes its name from Saint Connla, whose feast day falls on 10 May in the Irish Calendar. By 1841, when Ordnance Survey fieldworkers recorded their observations, his day was no longer celebrated locally, though one tradition had survived: that Connla killed a great serpent that had settled at a place called Lisnapeasna, about a quarter of a mile to the east. The church itself was first documented at a distance in 1302, when the papal taxation of the Diocese of Ardfert valued the church of 'Kilcoula' at 20 shillings per annum, with tithes of 2 shillings. By 1505, Edmund Fitzmaurice, a canon of Ardfert, was recorded in connection with the parish. A century later, the 1615 Royal Visitation of the Diocese of Ardfert found the vicarage united to the treasurership held by one Christopher Hicson, the combined living valued at five pounds and ten shillings, the house already described as ruined. The church itself, built of small hammered stones with lime-and-sand cement, was estimated by the Ordnance Survey fieldworkers to be no more than three or four centuries old at that point, suggesting a late medieval construction rather than an early Christian foundation.

A 2007 survey by Karen Buckley and Laurence Dunne found the walls still largely standing but under increasing pressure. Vegetation had taken hold across the exterior and interior, and a distinct outward slump below one of the south wall windows suggested that the graves pressing close against the base were beginning to undermine the masonry. Inside, a square recess at the junction of the south and east walls, possibly an original piscina (a small stone basin used for washing liturgical vessels), had been filled with rubble and waste cement. The doorway in the south wall retains its circular arch of 22 individual voussoir stones, slightly recessed from the wall face, and the socket for the original drawbar is still visible. Just inside the entrance, to the east, a broken holy water stoup of local sandstone survives.