The gables had gone, the south wall had broken away, and the building had contracted to a fragment of its former self. That fragment, measuring what had once been a modest nave of around 13.7 metres by 5.7 metres, is what scholars have been working from ever since.

The church at Kilcolman, in the Shanid barony, has a documented history stretching back to 1253, when it was restored by the Augustinian priory of Athissell in County Tipperary, one of the more powerful houses of that order in Munster during the medieval period. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, traced the site through a series of administrative records: it appears as Kilcolman-inferior in documents from 1302 and 1418, is noted within the territorial division known as Toghe Olybane in a 1586 survey attributed to Peyton, and surfaces again in records from 1591 and 1615. The dedication is to St Colman, a name shared by dozens of early Irish saints, and the association is reinforced by a holy well nearby, St Colman's Well, which was the focus of a pattern, meaning a traditional assembly of prayer and communal gathering held on a saint's feast day, on the 29th of October each year.

The site sits within a landscape that rewards patient visitors rather than those expecting obvious drama. The remains are slight, and the surrounding townland is quiet. The nearby holy well, recorded under its own separate monument reference, is worth seeking out alongside the church ruins, particularly if you are visiting in late October, when the pattern date lends the place a small additional resonance. The window in the surviving wall section was already defaced when recorded in 1840, so do not expect legible carved detail, but the basic fabric of the wall gives a reasonable sense of the original scale and construction.