It is all that survives of an eighteenth-century Church of Ireland building, and what makes it quietly odd is how it came to be isolated: in 1819, the nave was deliberately dismantled and its stones carted away to build St John's Church of Ireland on the town square. The tower was left behind, eventually declared ruinous by 1939 and its openings blocked up around 1940. What had been an entrance tower to a functioning church became, in effect, a freestanding limestone shell, three stages high, with a plain parapet and hammered quoins, keeping watch over the oldest part of the graveyard.

The site has a much longer ecclesiastical history than the surviving structure suggests. By 1302, the papal taxation of the Diocese of Ardfert valued the church of 'Listmokill', the Latin rendering of Listowel (from the Irish Lios Tuathail, meaning the fort of Tuathal), at 26 shillings and 8 pence per annum. In 1478, a William FitzMaurice appears in the records as a clerk of the diocese connected to the parish church, and the prior of Rattoo, a priory some distance to the north, served as rector of the parish. By 1615, when the Royal Visitation of the Diocese of Ardfert passed through, a minister named John Drea was resident, described as teaching school as well as serving several parishes; the visitation noted that the fruits of the livings had been directed toward the repair of the church. The tower itself was built around 1775, and its lower chamber was later converted into a vault for the Church family. The graveyard contains cut-stone grave markers and mausolea dating from roughly 1775 to 1940, and a gateway with cast-iron gates was added around 1850. When Ordnance Survey officers visited in 1841, they measured the tower at just over four and a half metres north to south and noted a semi-circular archway on the south side that had already been stopped up with masonry, suggesting the process of slow closure had begun well before the nave was formally demolished.