The rescue happened sometime in the mid to late nineteenth century, and the jamb was promptly mortared back into the wall where it still sits today, a fragment saved almost by accident. It is one of several carved sandstone pieces embedded in that wall, including a D-sectioned string course, a possible column base, and a chamfered fragment bearing a carved head, all of them suggesting an earlier building of considerably more ambition than the ruin that survives.

The church at Kildorrery appears in the Papal Taxation of 1291, which makes it among the older documented parish churches in north Cork. Its subsequent history follows a pattern familiar from the period: reported in ruins in 1591, back in repair by 1615, and then out of use again after the 1641 rebellion, still ruinous when noted in 1774. What survives is a nave and chancel built of sandstone rubble, with the nave's south wall still standing to something approaching full height, heavily ivy-covered on the exterior. The doorway near the west end retains a chamfered cut-limestone surround with a pointed arch, and beside it, set into a small pointed-arch niche, is a sandstone holy water stoup, a basin for blessed water placed at the entrance so worshippers could bless themselves on the way in. The chancel arch between the two sections of the building is barely visible now, smothered in ivy, but its side jambs survive, and one carries a stiff-leaf foliated capital of thirteenth-century type, almost certainly removed from a window surround elsewhere in the building. A photograph taken in 1907 still showed the springing of the arch rising from the south jamb. By the time the antiquary Windele visited in 1849, he found the chancel's north doorway already being stripped for grave markers, its moulded and foliated stones taken off piece by piece by the families burying their dead nearby. One fluted door jamb fragment ended up serving that exact purpose, inserted into the chancel floor as a headstone.