Nothing of that earlier structure survives above ground. The cut-stone entrance tower, the four-bay nave, and the chancel extension added around 1865 belong entirely to a later era, yet the footprint beneath them almost certainly belongs to a much older one. It is the kind of layering that is easy to walk past without noticing.

The site appears in the 1302 to 1306 papal taxation of the Deanery of Hacnye, in the diocese of Ardfert, listed under the name 'Ecclesia Nova', meaning New Church. By 1477, documents refer to the rectory of 'Ecclesiae Novae de Akymis', the second element relating to the Aicme Chiarraighe, an early Gaelic population group whose territory corresponded roughly to the barony of Trughanacmy. At that point, the patron of the rectory was the Earl of Desmond, one of the most powerful Hiberno-Norman dynasties in Munster. That connection continued until the Desmond Lordship collapsed; in 1596 to 1597, following the attainder of Gerald, Earl of Desmond, the advowson of the church, meaning the right to appoint its clergy, passed to George Isham of Brianstown in County Wexford. By 1612, under a patent letter from King James I, one Israel Taylor was presented to the rectory, with three local livings temporarily united on account of their small incomes and close proximity. A Royal Visitation of the diocese in 1615 found Nathaniell Langdon serving as minister, noted as able to catechise, with the benefice valued at twenty marks, though one Mr. Harbert thought it worth rather more, at thirty pounds. The church and its associated castle were considered prominent enough to be marked on a seventeenth-century map of County Kerry. When the Ordnance Survey passed through in 1841, its recorders noted simply that the old church had been replaced by a Protestant one built in 1824, a date that aligns closely with the architectural evidence for the current building, which dates to around 1820.