By 1987 the visible ruins amounted to little more than a fragment of the south wall, roughly six metres of roughly coursed rubble rising to about two metres, and a short stub of the west wall. Beside it, earlier maps had confidently labelled an adjoining structure to the north-east as a castle in ruins, though the more persuasive reading is that it was a presbytery, a residential tower for the resident priest. The townland name preserves something older still: Druim Deilgneach, meaning the Thorny Ridge or Hillock, the Irish placename quietly outlasting everything built on it.

The church's documentary history is a minor lesson in how ecclesiastical property moved through late medieval Ireland. Its earliest recorded mention is around 1300, when it was a diocesan church under the patronage of the Travers family. By the middle of the fifteenth century it had passed to the Troys, a family whose name the townland now carries in its anglicised form. In 1454 or 1455 the Troys transferred the church to Edmund mac Richard Butler, and he in turn conveyed it to St Francis Abbey in Kilkenny in 1479. That transfer effectively diminished the building's standing; once in Franciscan hands it lost its parochial status and was reduced to a capella, a dependent chapel, with its small parish absorbed into the civil parish of St Canice's. When St Francis Abbey was dissolved in 1540, the church appeared in the list of surrendered possessions described as satellite properties in a place recorded as Dumnart, alias Troeswoodde. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, examined this history in some detail and argued against a separate tradition that had linked the church to the Dominican Priory in Kilkenny, finding no evidence to support it. By Carrigan's time the structure measured internally about 11.5 metres long and 7.45 metres wide, with walls notably thin at around 0.6 metres, and only the foundations were substantially intact.