The building standing today is not the first to occupy this ground; beneath it, in a sense, lies the ghost of an earlier church that dated to 1774, a period when rural Protestant congregations across Ireland were establishing modest places of worship in response to the conditions of the Established Church. That earlier structure served the community for over a hundred years before it was replaced entirely.

The present church was built in 1881 and designed by W. H. Hill. The decision to build fresh rather than simply repair or extend the 1774 edifice suggests the older building had either deteriorated beyond practical use or was considered inadequate for the congregation of the time. Hill's commission resulted in a church known as Christ Church, and the fact that an architect was engaged at all points to a degree of ambition and organisation within the local parish. The detail is noted by Grove White, the early twentieth-century antiquarian whose systematic recording of Cork churches and historic buildings preserved information that might otherwise have gone untraced.