Around 1820, what remained of the older parish church was taken down and its stone reused as building material for the new church, which was positioned directly at the western end of the earlier structure's footprint. It is a fairly unsentimentally Irish solution to the problem of a ruined building, and it means that the medieval fabric has not disappeared so much as been folded into what came after.

The older church had a longer and more layered history than its end might suggest. According to the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, it had at one time been a prebendal church, meaning it was attached to a cathedral chapter and its income assigned to a clergyman called a prebendary, a common arrangement in medieval ecclesiastical organisation. Its patron was St. Mogue, an early Irish saint whose feast day fell on the fourteenth of February, a date now more commonly associated with other observances. The church fell into ruin not long after the Reformation, the period in the sixteenth century when the established church in Ireland was reorganised along Protestant lines, leaving many Catholic parish churches abandoned or repurposed. It survived as a ruin for roughly two and a half centuries before the demolition that finally consumed it.

The surrounding graveyard, which predates the current church, contains two medieval graveslabs. These carved stone markers, worn and weathered as such things tend to be, represent some of the oldest surviving physical evidence of the site's long use as a place of burial and religious assembly.