By 1940, even those remnants were gone, demolished and carted away to serve as farm fencing, despite a perfectly serviceable limestone quarry nearby. The people who knew what it was watched it disappear, and the people who took it either did not know or did not care. What remained was a faint circular depression in the grass, a few scattered stones, and the memory of bones.

When John O'Donovan recorded the site in 1841 for the Ordnance Survey, the church measured roughly nine and a half metres long and just under five metres wide, a modest rectangular building with no surviving name. The Ordnance Survey Name Books noted that its walls still stood about a metre high at that time, set within a circular earthwork roughly two chains, or about forty metres, in diameter, defined by a fosse and an old stone ditch. A fosse is simply a defensive or boundary ditch, and the circular enclosure here appears to have been a pre-existing ringfort, the kind of enclosed settlement common across early medieval Ireland, into which the church was later inserted. Infants were said to be occasionally buried within the enclosure, a practice associated with sites where unbaptised children were interred outside consecrated ground proper. By 1880, Hickson recorded that Lismore House had been built partly over the site, and that nearby stood what he described as two or three tiny oratories or chapels, along with a holy well called Tubbernataggart, meaning "the priest's well". The demolition of the remaining fabric was attributed to a Lowland Scottish farmer, whose practical appetite for ready-cut stone was evidently stronger than any scruple about its origins. When the County Kerry Field Club visited in March 1940, they found a man who had personally assisted at the demolition and who told them that human bones had been uncovered in two locations during the work. The field club also identified dressed window stones built into nearby gate pillars and out-offices, including a lintel stone that had been shaped to suggest a curved or arched form rather than lying flat, a detail that distinguished it from comparable windows at the church at Killelton in the Camp district.