The medieval church dedicated to St. John the Baptist has left no surface remains, and what the visitor sees today is a structure completed in 1813 on the exact footprint of its long-vanished predecessor. That building was itself burned in 1822 by followers of "Captain Rock", the name given to the agrarian secret society whose campaign of nocturnal violence against landlords and their symbols convulsed Munster in the early nineteenth century. The site, then, carries layers of absence as much as presence.

The documentary record of the earlier church reaches back at least to 1285, when a place recorded as Athleketh was held by Maurice fitzGerald. By 1292, a parson named Adam de Leyns was associated with the parish, and records show he gave land at Adare to the Augustinian priory there. A rector, Ric. de Aspale, appears in the records for 1318, and by 1377 the settlement was drawn into wider provincial affairs when the Sheriff, the Mayor, and a local figure called John Gower were directed to collect cattle for a military campaign against O'Breen and Macomarth of Tothemon. The parish had its share of internal disorder too: in 1394, a priest named Ric. Bondwill was found to have defrauded the church of fifteen marks, and one Tho. Hunt had held the living for two years without ordination. The dedication to St. John the Baptist is formally confirmed in a document from 1410, and monuments to the Webb and Lacy families, dated 1632, were recorded at the site, suggesting it retained significance for local gentry into the early modern period.

There is nothing dramatic to photograph here in the way of ruined arches or carved stonework; the medieval fabric is simply gone. What remains is the rebuilt and restored Church of Ireland church, a modest early nineteenth-century structure on a site with an unusually well-documented past. The surrounding area of south County Limerick is quiet farming country, and the church sits in the kind of setting where the gap between what the records describe and what the eye can see is itself the most interesting thing to consider.