Beneath part of the structure, or rather at its eastern end, there are signs that something older was here first.

The church itself is a fairly straightforward early nineteenth-century build, but researchers have noted that the basal course at its eastern end is crudely constructed in a way that sits awkwardly with the rest of the fabric. Bradley and colleagues, writing in 1985, interpreted this as potentially the foundation remnant of an earlier church that predates the 1820 structure. The idea is that the later building was raised on, or immediately beside, an already-established sacred site, a pattern that is far from unusual in Ireland, where ecclesiastical locations were often reused across centuries. No other surface trace of any earlier phase survives, so the rough stonework at the east end carries considerable interpretive weight for what is otherwise an unremarkable exterior.