For much of the twentieth century, the medieval church at its centre was invisible, its walls long since collapsed and absorbed into the ground. What remained was simply a raised mound at the western end of the burial ground, not obviously different from the uneven terrain around it. The church had been quietly buried by its own congregation.

The building dates to at least the thirteenth century, and a taxation record from 1302 to 1306 suggests it was already a functioning parish church, valued at twenty shillings, the same as Dingle at the time. By 1457 it was the subject of a papal dispute, and by 1615 its parsonage had passed, along with those of several neighbouring parishes, into the possession of Sir John Fitz Edmund, with ties to the Abbey of Owney in Limerick. Charles Smith noted it as ruinous in 1756. When John O'Donovan surveyed it for the Ordnance Survey in 1841, the walls still stood to about two and a half metres in places; he measured the building at roughly sixteen and a half metres long, recorded a pointed doorway in the south wall and a square one in the north, and noted the quoin stones of red grit at the corners. O'Donovan also recorded a folk tradition, that the church was built by one Urlin Ferriter, who lived in a nearby castle, and that the name Dunurlin derives from that association. In 1991, excavations funded through the American Ireland Fund and the Ireland Fund of Canada and directed by Mícháel Ó Coileáin uncovered the buried walls, finding both doorways intact, a water-font beside the south entrance, a drawbar socket for securing the door, and over a hundred pieces of worked stone, many from what appears to have been an early gargoyle drainage system running from the roof. The east window had been a double-light, cusped, ogee-headed window, a form in which the top of each opening curves into an S-shape. A grave slab bearing the name Terry Rice Ferriter and the dates 1551, 1642, 1722, and 1767 had been visible inside before the dig; it is thought to be a family memorial stone accumulated across generations.

The walls visible today are partly reconstructed following the 1991 excavation, and some later stone insertions are noticeably rough, with angle-grinder marks on the cut faces. The original in situ masonry, particularly at the north-west corner where the squared and dressed quoin stones survive, is markedly different in quality. The interior floor level was reduced during excavation to roughly the height of the doorway thresholds, removing most of the stratigraphy that centuries of burial had created. What the excavation recovered instead was a scatter of clay pipes, rosary beads, a 1928 Saorstát Éirinn shilling, and a fragment of a rotary quern found in the graveyard, small objects that place ordinary life alongside the long institutional history of the site.