That a dressed architectural fragment has been quietly repurposed as a gravemarker says something about how these old sites tend to work, the building gradually surrendering pieces of itself to the ground it once served.

The church it came from survives at the northern edge of the same graveyard, though only just. The rectangular structure measures roughly 14 metres east to west and 6.3 metres north to south, and its walls still stand to about one and a half metres in places, though much of it has partially collapsed and been claimed by vegetation. Gaps in the eastern and southern walls mark where windows and a doorway once opened, the technical term for these openings being "opes", a word still used in Irish architectural description. This was the parish church of Kilpatrick, a modest building of the kind that once served rural communities across County Cork before later ecclesiastical reorganisation left such structures to the elements.