What makes these ruins worth pausing over is not simply their age but the strange density of clerical history compressed into them: vicars with canonically complicated origins, an Augustinian monastery pulling administrative strings from a distance, and a 1435 papal letter that casually mentions mass had not been said for several years at a nearby sister church, while Murher itself was valued at a modest six marks per annum.

An eighth-century genealogy of the Ciarraige, the local ruling people of Kerry, names Murher, or Mag nAirthir, as a church site founded by Bishop Fáelán of that same dynasty, which gives the place roots well before any surviving stonework. By 1302 the church, then recorded as 'Magtr' in a papal taxation of the Diocese of Ardfert, was valued at ten shillings per annum. From at least the fourteenth century, the Augustinian canons at Rattoo, a priory some miles to the north-east, held the rectorship, meaning they collected the tithes while appointed vicars dealt with the parish itself. Those vicars appear in the documentary record with some frequency: Thateo O'Leagari in 1426, Donatus O'Conchubhair in 1432, and Dermot O'Scanlon in 1433 and again in 1435, when a papal letter granted O'Scanlon a dispensation to hold the vicarages of both Murher and Knockanure simultaneously for life. The letter is unusually candid about the reasons: O'Scanlon was the son of unmarried parents related in the third degree of kinship to one another, a situation requiring formal papal dispensation before he could hold any benefice at all. By 1615 the Royal Visitation of the Diocese of Ardfert found a Luke Moris serving as minister, and noted that both the church and chancel were well slated.

When Ordnance Survey fieldworkers measured the ruin in 1841, they recorded the south wall at eighty-two feet and the north wall at seventy feet, the walls themselves four feet thick and built of thin quarried stones set in lime and sand cement. The north wall doorway, semicircular at its head and formed of chiselled limestone, was already gone at the top on the inside but still legible from outside. A 2011 architectural survey found an acroterion, an apex stone block with a central socket that would once have held a stone or iron finial, lying to the east of the ruins, along with a broken fragment of a finely tooled finial and an unusual carved stone slab with a drilled hole whose purpose remains uncertain. Across the surrounding graveyard, which has been in continuous use, the annual patron day on 8 September in honour of the Blessed Virgin was still being observed at least as late as the mid-nineteenth century.