What makes the site at Knockuregare quietly arresting is partly what is no longer there. The western church, known historically as Uregare, survived long enough to be noted by Fitzgerald in 1826, its walls still standing. Sometime between that year and 1840, the entire structure was demolished and its stone reused to build the surrounding graveyard wall. The church did not fall; it was simply repurposed, absorbed into the boundary that now marks its own absence.

The antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1904 to 1905, traced the site through a tangle of medieval spellings, each one a phonetic guess at an Irish original: Urthegedy in 1285, Euergarr and Uirgedi in 1291, Urigari in 1302. By 1410 the church was formally dedicated to St. Margaret, on the 20th of July of that year, under the name Urigear or Viridus. A few years later, in 1418, the rectory was recorded as belonging to the prioress of Teachmolynd, indicating the site had come under the administration of a religious house. The area also appears in a 1317 legal dispute, a suit brought by the Bagots concerning what the records call Muchil-wrygedy and Lytel-wrygedy, suggesting the two churches gave their names to the surrounding townlands. A 1586 survey places the whole district within what it describes as Pobble unkaght, also called Fox's country, a reference to the Gaelic territory of the time. The ancient cantred of Iolegar, a cantred being a medieval administrative division of land, lay around it as early as 1290.

The second church, Urigedy, lies at some distance to the east, within its own graveyard beyond Greenpark and south of Ballygrennane Castle, a substantial old mansion that still survives. Near the western site, St. Margaret's Well, dedicated to the same saint as the church, also remains. Holy wells in Ireland were often associated with nearby ecclesiastical foundations and continued to be visited long after the churches themselves fell into ruin or, in this case, were taken down stone by stone. The graveyard wall, built from the rubble of the church it replaced, is perhaps the most tangible thing a visitor can examine here, knowing that the dressed or rough-cut stone beneath the mortar once formed the nave and walls of a building that served this parish for several hundred years.