Neighbours have called it Kilmonoge Abbey for generations, crediting its foundation to the Longs of Mount Long, a landed family whose name carries some weight in this part of Cork. The only difficulty is that no monastic foundation of that name appears in any scholarly record of Irish religious houses. The abbey, it seems, exists in memory and local attachment more than in documented history, and the building itself offers few clues either way.

What survives is divided between two distinct structural fates. The nave, the main body of the church, measuring roughly nine and a half metres from east to west, has sunk almost entirely back into the earth; its walls now rise barely half a metre above ground and are largely covered with sod. The chancel, the eastern portion traditionally reserved for the clergy and the altar, fares considerably better. Its walls stand close to their original height, and though the east gable has fallen, the north wall still contains the collapsed remnants of a wall press, a small recess built into the masonry to store liturgical objects, along with the opening of a window. A writer named Brunicardi, noting all this in 1913, suggested that by the church's final years the chancel alone was likely serving the entire congregation, the nave having perhaps already become unusable. The documentary record broadly supports this picture of slow decline: the building was recorded as being in repair in both 1615 and 1639, but by 1699 it had been abandoned entirely, ivy gradually taking back what the parish had let go.