The tower structure to the west-northwest reads as older than the church around it, the kind of architectural inconsistency that tends to go unnoticed but carries a small historical puzzle inside it.

The scholar Liam Price, writing in 1967, recorded that a new church was built near Dunganstown House in the latter part of the seventeenth century, tentatively around 1670. The leading candidate for that building's location is this same St. Kevin's church, with the mismatched tower as the surviving clue. If Price's identification is correct, what visitors see today is a structure that has absorbed or grown around an earlier phase of construction, the tower predating whatever campaign of building or rebuilding produced the rest of the church. The dedication to St. Kevin, the sixth-century monastic founder most closely associated with Glendalough a short distance to the west, hints at older ecclesiastical connections in the area, though the visible fabric here belongs to a much later period.