St. Laurence's church once stood somewhere within what is now the sprawling complex of Beamish and Crawford's Brewery in Cork city, though no trace of it survives above ground and the circumstances of its founding remain genuinely obscure.

What little is known amounts to a handful of dated references and a telling silence. By 1616, the building was already recorded as 'waste', meaning it had fallen into ruin or disuse, perhaps long before anyone thought to document its origins. A generation later, in 1666, a St. Laurence's Lane was noted in the area, suggesting the church had left at least a topographical mark on the neighbourhood even after the fabric itself was gone. Beyond that, the early history of the church is, in the words of those who have looked into it, simply unknown. No founder, no date of construction, and no record of its religious life have come to light. The dedication to St. Laurence, a third-century Roman martyr whose feast day falls in August, was common enough in medieval Ireland, which makes the name alone an unreliable guide to the church's age or origins.