That combination of features tells a quiet story about the particular constraints of rural Irish Catholic worship in the nineteenth century, where modest means and practical necessity shaped buildings in ways that have since been largely forgotten.

The cruciform church at Mullaghroe appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, suggesting it was already standing and considered worth recording by then. A cruciform plan, that is, a building laid out in the shape of a cross, was a reasonably ambitious form for a rural Catholic chapel of that period. It is thought to have replaced an earlier thatched chapel that stood within the adjacent graveyard, a common arrangement in pre-Emancipation Ireland when Catholic congregations made do with whatever modest structures they could maintain. By 1904 the building was being identified on maps as St James's Church. The internal galleries that were recorded, raised platforms running along the walls to increase seating capacity, were a practical response to growing congregations in a building that could not easily be extended. The mud floor, meanwhile, points to the economic realities that persisted even as the building took on its more formal identity. In 1907 a new Catholic church was built roughly 450 metres to the north-east, and St James's, its liturgical life over, was repurposed as a parish hall before eventually being demolished.