What makes this site quietly unusual is the presence of a cross-inscribed stone built into its boundary wall during the late 1980s, relocated from the adjoining townland of Killoughane. The stone's journey is a reminder that early Christian carved stones frequently end up reused or moved, absorbed into later structures rather than preserved in situ, their original context lost but their physical presence somehow maintained.

The church itself has a traceable institutional history stretching back to at least the early fifteenth century. Papal Annates, which were records of taxes paid to Rome on the appointment of clergy to a benefice, mention the parish in 1433, 1479, 1487, and 1511, suggesting it functioned as an active parish church across that period. A Royal Visitation of 1615 recorded it as being 'up and well', a reassuring if brief assessment, and by 1622 it appeared in a list of parochial churches within the diocese. The minister in 1633 was one Willmus Lane, who held the living here simultaneously with that of a place recorded as 'Dunlo'. The graveyard became the burial ground of the Macgillycuddy's of the Reeks, a branch of the O'Sullivan Mores, one of the great Gaelic dynasties of Munster, whose associated stronghold of Dromaloughane castle stood nearby. The pairing of church and dynasty burial ground was a common arrangement in Gaelic Ireland, linking spiritual authority and aristocratic lineage in the same patch of ground.