The ground within the graveyard here gives no indication that a building ever stood upon it, yet maps and documents tell a different story, one of a structure that was still partially upright within living memory of people now long dead, and which had already been quietly disappearing for centuries before that.

When the Ordnance Survey teams came through in 1841 and recorded their observations in the Field Books, they found walls still standing and noted a small square window measuring roughly two feet by one foot six inches, a modest opening of the kind associated with early Irish ecclesiastical buildings. The church at that point could still be read as a structure. By 1842 it appeared on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map as a rectangular building of around fifteen metres running roughly east to west, positioned slightly east of centre within its graveyard. Within a few decades the picture had changed: on the 1905 and again the 1937 editions of the same map series, the building is marked only as a 'site of', the cartographic shorthand for something that has ceased to exist above ground. The church itself had been noted much earlier in the Papal Taxation of 1302 to 1306, a medieval survey of church properties and their valuations compiled for Rome, which places the building firmly within the landscape of organised ecclesiastical life in medieval Cork. The graveyard sits within what appears to be an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that in Ireland often marks the footprint of a monastic or early Christian foundation predating the Norman period.

The site today is most legible through the graveyard that survived it. The church itself has passed entirely below the surface, leaving the grass and the headstones to occupy a space that, as recently as the 1840s, still held standing masonry and a small window that someone once looked through.