Scholars Gwynn and Hadcock established as much in 1988, yet the misnomer has stuck, lending the site a slightly inflated air it does not quite deserve and does not need. What actually stands here, heavily mantled in ivy and slowly losing the battle against collapse, is the medieval parish rectory of Castletown Kindalen, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The south wall and west gable are the best-preserved sections, reaching close to their original height of around 2.6 metres, though even these are so thickly clad that the stonework beneath is largely invisible. More telling are the details at ground level: four punch-dressed chamfered limestone voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones of an arch, lie scattered on the surface in front of the original doorway in the south wall, hinting at what was probably a four-centred arch, a form common in late-medieval Irish ecclesiastical building. Tucked into the interior of the south wall is a small square-headed aumbry, a shallow wall-cupboard used to store liturgical vessels, its modest dimensions of roughly half a metre in each direction still clearly legible in the stonework.

The church appears in the ecclesiastical taxation of Ireland compiled between 1302 and 1306, recorded under the name 'Vastina' and valued at 20 marks. By 1409 its rector was acting as the archbishop's proctor for disciplinary proceedings across several Meath deaneries, a detail that suggests the living carried some administrative weight. In 1450 a papal letter intervened directly in the appointment of its incumbent, instructing abbots and archdeacons to install Andrew Oharayn despite his illegitimate birth, and to remove Maurice Macrethin, who had held on to the benefice without proper authority for over sixteen years. After the Reformation, ownership of the rectory became genuinely confused: one strand of evidence ties it to the Augustinian Priory in Mullingar, whose prior John Petit leased it to Edward Petit and Thomas Casey in 1540 following the dissolution of the monastery in 1539. Another strand, from the Tudor Fiants, places it among the possessions of the Dominican friary in the same town. In 1566 Walter Hope, a Dublin merchant, was granted the rectory along with the friary site under a fee-farm arrangement. By 1610 the grant had passed to Thomas Hope of Mullingar, and by 1677 it had reached a Dr Neptune Bllod, Dean of Kilfenora, who received it in fee simple at an annual rent of six pounds sterling. By 1867, when the historian Cogan described the church, most of the walls had already been quarried away for building material; he noted a surviving length of roughly ninety-four feet and remarked that it was all but gone.