It is an unusually blunt inscription even by the standards of post-Reformation Ireland, and it sits on a building whose own biography is layered enough to warrant a second look. The interior has long since been gutted, but the shell, together with its graveyard, holds a quiet accumulation of historical time that the town below rarely advertises.

The church at Coolfadda was built in 1610 and consecrated in 1625, the same year as that sobering plaque. It was enlarged in 1829, and when repairs were carried out around 1843, workers uncovered traces of what was described as an 'old entrenchment', suggesting the ridge had seen earlier, defensive use. The building is laid out on an east-west axis and takes a cruciform plan, with a chancel added to the east end, a tower and spire at the south-west corner of the nave, and lean-to additions to the transepts. Triple-light windows punctuate the nave and transepts. Inside, almost everything has gone, save for a collection of eighteenth and nineteenth-century wall memorials. The graveyard itself is enclosed by a stone wall, and the northern section of that wall follows the line of Bandon's old town wall, a medieval boundary repurposed as an ecclesiastical one. Headstones in the yard run from the early eighteenth century to the present day, the older ones sharing ground with the newer in the manner common to long-used burial places.