By 1841, when the Ordnance Survey recorded the area, no trace of the building remained above ground. What had once been a functioning parish church had dissolved so completely into the landscape that only the enclosure itself survived as evidence of its former presence.

The church's documentary life is brief but telling. It appears in the Desmond Inquisition of 1584, a legal proceeding that followed the attainder of the Fitzgerald Earls of Desmond and catalogued landholdings and ecclesiastical arrangements across Munster in the aftermath of rebellion. By 1622 it was still listed among the parochial churches of the diocese, suggesting it remained at least nominally active into the early seventeenth century. Something changed in the decades that followed. By 1756, when the Cork historian Charles Smith noted it, the building was already a ruin. The speed of its disappearance after that point is striking: within roughly eighty years of Smith's observation, the structure had vanished entirely, leaving only the graveyard's rectangular outline to suggest that something had once stood here with enough regularity and community purpose to be recorded in a royal inquisition.