Beneath and around the 1812 structure, the medieval world is still quietly present, if you know where to look.

The oldest documentary trace of a church here comes from 1197, when St. David's church was gifted to St Thomas's Abbey in Dublin, one of the Augustinian foundations that accumulated considerable landholdings across the medieval Pale. The site appears again in the Ecclesiastical Taxation of Ireland, compiled between 1302 and 1306, a survey that catalogued church properties and their estimated values across the country, and which serves today as a useful index of just how many small parishes were functioning across medieval Leinster. By the late eighteenth century, the medieval chapel had largely disappeared, though its gable end was still standing at that point, a detail recorded by Price in 1942 drawing on earlier observation. What stands now is a Board of First Fruits church, erected in 1812. The Board of First Fruits was an ecclesiastical body that funded the construction and repair of Church of Ireland buildings throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and its plain, spare style of building is recognisable across rural Ireland. Lewis noted the site in 1849, by which point the medieval origins were already a matter of record rather than living memory.

The site is at Castlefarm in County Dublin, and the most tangible evidence of its longer history is not the 1812 church itself but what lies just outside it. Wall footings are visible to the south of the church, the low stone remnants of the earlier medieval chapel that the Board of First Fruits structure replaced. These are easy to overlook, particularly in summer when vegetation can obscure low stonework, so a visit in late autumn or winter, when the ground is clearer, gives the better chance of reading the outline of the earlier building. There is nothing dramatically ruinous here, no roofless nave or soaring arch, but the layering of ecclesiastical use across eight centuries is legible for anyone willing to walk the ground slowly.