It is a quietly unusual detail, the kind of thing that rewards a second look, and it sits alongside Y-tracery windows, a bellcote on the north gable, and a gallery tucked at the north end of the interior. The building is dedicated to the Holy Angels and St Finbarr, the sixth-century monk who founded a monastery at the source of the River Lee and became patron saint of Cork. A plaque records the church being blessed in 1869 under that dedication, which might lead a visitor to assume a mid-Victorian construction date.

The building itself, however, tells a different story. Its architectural style is clearly early nineteenth century, and it appears already fully formed on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842. A stone plaque bearing that year, now sitting in the farmyard of nearby Inchigeelagh House, is thought to have originally belonged to the church. A hundred metres or so to the south, the present parish hall occupies the site of an earlier T-shaped Roman Catholic chapel, which was probably the building Samuel Lewis described in his 1837 Topographical Dictionary of Ireland as having been built in 1820 and considerably enlarged in 1830. That earlier chapel has since been absorbed into or replaced by the hall, leaving the Carrigleigh church as the surviving structure, older than its dedication plaque suggests, surrounded by a graveyard of nineteenth- and twentieth-century inscribed headstones.