The present building, it seems, was not raised on empty ground but on the footprint of an earlier sacred place, absorbing it so thoroughly that the older structure survives now only as a note in the historical record.

In 1700, Bishop Dive Downes recorded that ruins of a chapel stood at the west end of the town, and identified it as the site on which the Protestant church had subsequently been built. The chapel, he noted, had been dedicated to Saint Molaga. A separate account, cited by Brady in 1863, places a church here in ruins as early as 1699, suggesting the older structure was already well gone by the time Downes made his observation. Whether these two references describe the same building or point to slightly different phases of use and collapse is not entirely clear, but together they sketch a picture of layered ecclesiastical occupation at this western edge of the Mizen Peninsula, where the land narrows before dropping into the sea.