Grass-covered foundations trace out the rest of the rectangular plan, roughly 18 metres long and just under 7 metres wide. But set into the ground outside the north-west corner of the church is something older and stranger than the masonry itself: a granite bullaun stone, a roughly worked boulder with a shallow circular basin worn or cut into its surface, a type of stone associated with early Christian and even pre-Christian ritual use across Ireland, sometimes linked to healing, cursing, or the grinding of pigments and grain. This one sits quietly at the edge of a graveyard that most people in the area would drive past without a second thought.

The site carries a long and layered history. It was the church of St. Cuán of Aribhre, an early Irish saint said to have been a contemporary of St. Munna of Taghmon and credited with raising Ceallachán, son of the king of the Fothairt, the people whose name survives in the modern barony of Forth. St. Cuán's feast day fell on the 10th of July, and a holy well dedicated to him lies roughly two kilometres to the north-north-east in Longridge townland. The church's medieval fortunes were shaped by the ambitions of the Norman lord Hervey de Montmorency, who granted the church of Kilcogan in Bargy, as it was then known, to Christchurch Abbey in Canterbury around 1183, apparently upon entering that monastery as a monk. The Canterbury connection did not last indefinitely: in 1245 the church passed to the Cistercian abbey of Tintern in County Wexford, and it remained in Tintern's possession until the dissolution of the monasteries, still appearing in lists of the abbey's holdings at the Suppression in 1540. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, carried out a formal visitation, the vicar Patrick Kelly was found guilty of adultery and removed from his post. The condition of the church at that point went unrecorded.

Beneath and around the visible ruins, aerial photographs have revealed the cropmarks of a much larger oval enclosure, roughly 160 metres across at its widest point, defined by field banks and a outer fosse with a narrower inner drain. The church and its graveyard sit towards the eastern edge of this older boundary, which once encompassed a significantly larger sacred landscape. Parts of the enclosing bank have since been removed, and archaeological testing just outside the enclosure produced nothing directly related to the site, leaving the earlier phases of activity here largely undisturbed and unresolved.