What is less straightforward is the building's earlier life, and the quiet puzzle of how a Roman Catholic chapel became a rural schoolhouse somewhere between one Ordnance Survey map and the next.

The 1842 OS six-inch map shows the structure in a quite different form: a T-shaped plan, its long axis running north to south with a central projection to the east, and labelled 'Old R.C. Chapel'. By the time the 1903 survey was made, the building had been reoriented, at least in plan, to a long axis running east to west with a projection to the south, and it appears simply as a school within the small settlement of Scart, roughly a kilometre south of Kildorrery in north Cork. Whether the fabric was substantially rebuilt or adapted is not entirely clear, but the 1847 date on the entrance front suggests a significant intervention around the time the National School system, established in Ireland in 1831, was expanding into rural parishes across the country. The finished building is a considered piece of vernacular institutional architecture: seven bays across the entrance front, ten at the rear, brick chimneys sitting atop each gable and one rising from the centre, and a broad two-bay gabled projection that sits fractionally off-centre in a way that catches the eye once you know to look for it. A large playground survives to the rear, its dividing wall still punctuated by the outside toilet blocks that would have been standard provision for a rural school of this period.

The building is now vacant, sitting on the north-west side of the road that runs south from Kildorrery into Scart. The date plaque on the projecting entrance bay is the clearest thing to look for, a small piece of lettering that quietly anchors the building to a particular year and a particular ambition to put a school within reach of every rural community in Ireland.