The building at Skehanagh, recorded on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map under the name Ballyheedy R.C. Chapel, was erected in 1823, and local tradition holds that it was raised on the site of an earlier penal church. Penal churches were the informal, often makeshift places of Catholic worship that proliferated during the eighteenth century, when the Penal Laws severely restricted the public practice of the faith. That the community here chose to build on the same ground in 1823, shortly after Catholic Emancipation began to loosen those restrictions, suggests a conscious continuity with what had come before.

The 1823 structure is a rectangular nave church orientated on a north-south axis, with pointed windows in the east and west walls fitted with wooden switch-line tracery, a form of decorative window framing carved or assembled from timber rather than cut stone. A porch opens to the north, a sacristy occupies the southern end, and a bellcote sits on the north gable. The whole building sits within a rectangular graveyard. What has vanished entirely is a pair of National Schools that the same 1842 map shows at the southern end of the church, one designated for girls and one for boys. No trace of them survives today, leaving only the cartographic record as evidence they were ever there.