What remains today is an overgrown east gable and a short section of north wall, all that survives of a building that was, by one contemporary account in 1837, "a small, neat edifice, with a low square tower." That description comes from Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, recorded at a moment when the building was still in use. Within four years of Lewis writing those words, the congregation had moved on to a new church in Castletownbear, and the neat little edifice was left to the graveyard and the ivy.

The church was constructed in 1812 by the Board of First Fruits, a body established under the Church of Ireland to fund the building and repair of Protestant churches and glebe houses across the country. The Board was a significant force in early nineteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture in Ireland, responsible for hundreds of modest churches in a broadly Gothic style, many of them similarly short-lived or long since abandoned. This particular building at Curradonohoe lasted barely a generation in active use before it was superseded by the new church at Castletownbear in 1841. Beneath the 1812 structure lies something older still: the site was that of a medieval parish church, the kind of layered ecclesiastical geography that is common across West Cork, where new buildings were routinely planted on grounds that had been sacred for centuries before them.