When surveyors recorded it in 1840, they measured it carefully: six feet high, six feet long, and five and a half feet thick, built from large stones set in lime and sand mortar, and believed to be part of an original gable end. The sheer thickness of that wall relative to its surviving height gives a sense of how substantial the building once was, even if almost nothing of it now stands. It sits in the centre of an old graveyard, with a nineteenth-century Catholic parish chapel occupying the southern side of the same ground, the two structures separated by several centuries and a very different set of circumstances.

The parish has a recorded history stretching back at least to the mid-fourteenth century. Thomas Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, noted that one Edmond Braynof of Emly was appointed canon and prebendary of Dysirt Lauran in 1363, receiving thirty-eight gold florins yearly, a detail drawn from the Calendar of Papal Petitions. A further entry from 1405 records a T. Obroggy receiving the living of Esterlawran in the diocese of Emly. The place name itself shifts across the centuries, appearing as Ynsin Laurence in 1583, St. Laurence parish in 1615, and Isert or Inshin Laurence by 1657. The word "isert" or "dysert" refers to a desert or hermitage in the early Irish ecclesiastical tradition, a place of withdrawal associated with an ascetic or a saint, which points to origins considerably older than the medieval records confirm.

The graveyard lies on the north side of the road between Croom and Caherconlish, roughly in the middle of the townland's southern boundary. On the western side of the enclosure, close to where the old church wall stands, there is St. Lawrence's Well, covered by a stone flag and shaded by a large ash tree when it was described in 1840. Holy wells of this kind were focal points for patterns, or patrons, which were communal gatherings held on a saint's feast day, involving prayer, procession, and often a good deal of socialising. A patron was held here on the tenth of August, St. Lawrence's Day, until around 1810, after which the practice lapsed, though the feast day continued to be observed locally as a holiday. The well was still being visited on Saturdays at the time of the 1840 survey, a rhythm of devotion that had clearly outlasted the formal pattern itself.