What makes it quietly arresting is the precision of that early description: recorded in 1700 as being above seventy feet long, well slated, and well furnished with seats, the church was clearly still a functioning, maintained building at the turn of the eighteenth century, not yet a ruin or a memory.

The description comes from a 1909 publication by Lunham, drawing on an account made around 1700, which places this as the original parish church of Carrigaline. At seventy feet or more in length, it would have been a substantial structure for its time and place, and the detail about seating suggests a church that was actively serving a congregation rather than simply standing. The slated roof, noted specifically, points to a building that someone was investing in. What happened between that relatively prosperous snapshot and the present state of the site, where only the graveyard context survives, is not recorded here, but the gap between a well-maintained church in 1700 and an archaeological site today is itself part of the story of how deeply the ecclesiastical landscape of Cork shifted across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.