On the Ordnance Survey 1:2500 plan, surveyed between 1912 and 1916, it is marked as a school. By the time the OS 6-inch edition appeared in 1938, the same structure had been relabelled as an R.C. Chapel, depicted as a roofed rectangular building measuring roughly 22 metres along its longer axis and 8 metres across. Whether its function genuinely changed in the intervening years, or whether earlier surveyors simply recorded it differently, is not clear. Today, no visible trace of the building remains.

The burial ground with which it was associated is itself attached to a medieval church, suggesting that this corner of east Galway has been used for religious purposes across a considerable stretch of time. The repurposing or dual use of modest rural buildings as both school and chapel was not unusual in post-Penal Law Ireland, where Catholic communities often shared or adapted whatever structures were available. A small rectangular building serving one function on a weekday and another on a Sunday would have been an entirely familiar arrangement in a parish like this. What makes Cloghanower quietly interesting is the way the cartographic record preserves that ambiguity, the same walls described differently by two generations of map-makers, and then gone.