When Ordnance Survey officers passed through in 1840, they noted that no trace of an earlier church remained in the graveyard, and recorded the local explanation: the walls of a medieval church that had stood on the same ground had been pulled down to supply stone for the new building. One structure cannibalised another, and the record of the older one effectively disappeared into the masonry of its replacement.

The site has an ecclesiastical history stretching back at least to the late thirteenth century. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, traced references to Ballycahane as a parish and prebend, a prebend being an endowment that provided income to a cathedral clergyman, within the barony of Pubblebrian. The place appears in legal records as early as 1291, and by the fourteenth century it was generating the kind of disputes that find their way into the Plea Rolls: in 1323 and 1324, lawsuits were recorded involving Anastas, widow of Henry Berkeley, as well as Nic. Laundry and David Fitzgerald, over lands at Balychatan. By 1361 a scholar of Canon Law named Bartholomew Dulardi held the canonry or prebend of Bali Cathain in Limerick, and the prebend continued to appear in records into the early sixteenth century. The church that replaced all of this was a Board of First Fruits building, the Board of First Fruits being a body that financed Church of Ireland construction across Ireland in the early nineteenth century. Its tower was erected in 1823 and the main body of the church followed in 1830.

The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage records the structure as now ruinous, describing a three-bay nave, a three-stage square-plan entrance tower, and projecting side chapels to the north and south. The building retains enough of its form to read clearly as a small early nineteenth-century Protestant parish church, even in its current condition. The graveyard surrounding it is the most tangible layer of continuity on the site, occupying ground that has evidently served a religious function since at least medieval times, even if the physical evidence of those earlier centuries was largely dismantled long ago.