Tombs press against the church's southern wall from the outside, and a nineteenth-century Catholic chapel, also now in ruins, was built directly against its northern wall, giving the whole site a layered, accumulated quality, as though each generation simply folded itself around what the last one left. The church looks west over St Finan's Bay and towards the Skelligs, the jagged rock stacks that sit several miles offshore.

The site is known as Killemlagh, or in Irish Cill Imleach, and its history is long enough to resist easy dating. It is traditionally associated with St Finan, as is a holy well a short distance to the west. An ogham stone, a type of early medieval monument inscribed with a linear alphabet used in Ireland from roughly the fourth century onwards, may be embedded in the western gable of the medieval church, and this detail, alongside the Finan connection, suggests the site could rest on the foundations of a much older ecclesiastical settlement. The church appears in the Papal Taxation List of 1302 to 1306, recorded under the Diocese of Ardfert as 'Killymlach'. By the Royal Visitation of 1615, it was listed as the 'vicaradge of KilmcEllockochistra' and its church was noted as being in good condition. Within a century and a half, that condition had changed considerably; by the mid-eighteenth century, it was already recorded as being in ruins.

What is perhaps the strangest detail on record is the specific nature of the people who once made devotional rounds here. According to a 1902 source, those who came to perform the rounds were particularly people afflicted with diseases of a scrofulous nature, meaning conditions involving swollen lymph nodes, often associated historically with tuberculosis of the lymph glands. The conjunction of a saint's name, a holy well, a possible ogham stone, and a very specific category of suffering gives the site an atmosphere that its current ruined state, overlooking that wide Atlantic view, does nothing to dispel.