The former Church of Ireland parish church of Athnowen at Carrigane, Co. Cork, deconsecrated in 1979, has done neither. It remains roofed and largely intact, sitting on the western side of its graveyard with a quiet, slightly suspended quality, as though waiting for a congregation that stopped arriving decades ago.

The building has accumulated its present form across roughly two centuries of incremental work. It appears to have been rebuilt in the early eighteenth century, though the most precisely dated element is the four-storey tower at the western end, whose inscribed stone plaque records its addition in 1756. The tower is a careful piece of work: a string course marks the division between each floor, the ground-floor entrance is round-arched, and the floors above are lit by round-arched louvred openings on all sides, the kind of opes more usually associated with sound than with light, designed to let bell-tones carry outward. Pinnacles finish the tower at its corners, giving the whole composition a modest vertical emphasis unusual in a rural parish church of this scale. The nave is a plain rectangle, and the shallow chancel projecting from the eastern end was most likely added during the extensive repairs carried out in 1877 and 1888, part of a broader Victorian effort to bring older Protestant churches up to contemporary liturgical standards. The parish it served was Athnowen, and the building represents the accumulated investments of that congregation across nearly two centuries before its deconsecration.