The walls themselves, around 85 centimetres thick, give little away in terms of age. What makes the site quietly strange is that the stones do not stay put, or rather, some of them have migrated. Dressed stone from the demolished building appears to have been reused in the graveyard wall to the south-west, so the church has, in a sense, folded itself into the boundary that now contains it.

The site sits roughly 25 metres north-west of a Cistercian abbey, and this proximity is the key to understanding its layered history. By the early nineteenth century, the parish church of Lerha, or Abbey-Laragh as it was also known, was described as occupying the site of the former monastic buildings. J. N. Brewer noted as much in his 1826 work The Beauties of Ireland, capturing a moment when Protestant parish infrastructure had settled, literally, onto the foundations of an older Catholic religious landscape. Nicholas Carlisle, writing in 1810, referred to what appears to be this same building as a "new church", suggesting it was a relatively recent construction at that point, most likely a late eighteenth or early nineteenth century Church of Ireland building. The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, across all their editions, mark it consistently as a church in the north-western quadrant of the graveyard, even after its demolition had reduced it to the footings visible today.