The building is Aghavallen, known in Irish as Achadh Mhálainn, a name whose first element means simply "a field", though the second part has resisted explanation. What makes this ruin quietly disorienting is the layering of uses compressed into a single structure: a probable fifteenth-century Catholic parish church that was later appropriated as a Protestant place of worship, then partially roofed and modernised as a working church into the nineteenth century, then closed in 1858, then repurposed almost immediately as a burial ground, and now fenced off entirely by Kerry County Council on grounds of structural danger.

The documentary record reaches back to 1302, when papal taxation valued the church at 26 shillings and 8 pence per annum. By 1427, the perpetual vicarage was in the gift of the Augustinian house at Rattoo, and the living had just passed from one Maurice O'Kennelly to a Tadhg O'Kennelly. The 1615 Royal Visitation of the Diocese of Ardfert recorded a minister named Dermot O'Connor serving the combined vicarage of Aghavallen and Lisseltyne. By 1756 a writer named Smith could note that the church was still in repair and held under the patronage of one Anthony Stoughton. When the antiquarian John O'Donovan surveyed it for the Ordnance Survey in 1841, the east end, about nine metres of a structure roughly twenty-seven metres long overall, was still roofed and actively used, its windows modernised; the rest was already falling into ruin, though he measured and described the surviving pointed doorway, stacked limestone windows, and the damaged belfry on the west gable with considerable precision. After closure in 1858, the Ponsonby family erected a large house-shaped tomb inside the east end in 1864, placed directly in front of where the altar had stood. The Crosbies of Rusheen House, and the Colt, Pope, and Sandes families, are also buried here, their monuments now engulfed by the same unchecked vegetation that has been accelerating since the church was sealed off.

For those who pass the site, the walls do still stand to something close to their full original height, and a corbel course of finely dressed chamfered limestone, which once carried the roof timbers, runs along the interior of the east end on both the north and south elevations. Access into the interior has been blocked, and a temporary fence has been erected; the condition of the fabric, with corner quoins robbed out and vegetation forcing through the masonry, makes the caution reasonable. The rose motif on the surviving hood moulding of the east window is visible only with difficulty through the ivy, but it remains one of the more quietly elegant details on a building that has been used, altered, abandoned, and overgrown across more than seven centuries.