Erected in 1800, it replaced nothing visible, at least nothing that had survived, yet the graveyard around it marks the site of the ancient parish church of Dungourney, a place of worship whose origins reach back well before any surviving record.

What makes this site quietly puzzling is the gap between what the ground implies and what it now shows. By 1774, the earlier church was already a ruin, recorded as such by Brady in his 1863 ecclesiastical survey. Somewhere in the intervening years, the fabric of that older structure disappeared entirely, leaving no stonework, no foundations, no architectural trace that predates the 1800 building. Whether the earlier church was robbed for building material, cleared when the new one was erected, or simply collapsed beyond recovery is not known. The Dungourney parish church that once stood here has effectively vanished into the ground it consecrated.