The structure appears on an Ordnance Survey six-inch map from 1902, marked plainly as a chapel in ruins, and yet local knowledge recorded since then holds that the interior has remained intact. A building can be roofless and broken at its edges while still preserving something of its original form within, and that seems to be the case here, where the shell has outlasted what cartographers once wrote off.

The chapel stands beside a graveyard, the two forming the kind of paired site that was once common across rural Catholic Ireland, particularly in areas where formal church building came late or was constrained by circumstance. Communities in the post-Penal era often maintained modest vernacular chapels alongside their burial grounds, structures that served a congregation without the ambition of permanence. The Driminidy chapel is catalogued in the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, published in 1992, which drew on both fieldwork and local oral knowledge to document what remained on the ground across West Cork. That the interior was noted as surviving suggests somebody had looked inside and found more than the exterior promised.