A medieval parish church and its annexed chapel are referenced in a papal document from 1469, yet when you look at the standing ruins today, there is nothing older than the early nineteenth century.

The 1469 reference comes from the Calendar of Papal Registers, which records that a man named David Fissmoris held the rectorship of the parish church of Balehedirsgeoil, a place that had the chapel of Leac attached to it. The name Leac is the older Irish form of the placename that survives today as Lack. That the arrangement merited a mention in papal correspondence suggests it was a functioning ecclesiastical unit of some standing in the late medieval period. Yet despite that paper trail, no physical trace of the medieval structure has been identified. The ruins that remain belong to a Roman Catholic chapel constructed in 1810, as recorded by Samuel Lewis in his 1837 Topographical Dictionary of Ireland. Whether the earlier chapel was demolished, absorbed, or simply vanished from the landscape is not known.

What visitors encounter, then, is a post-Penal era chapel, built during a period when Catholic congregations across Ireland were finally able to erect permanent places of worship after decades of legal restriction. The site is a reminder that ecclesiastical continuity on the ground does not always match the written record, and that a placename can carry the memory of a building long after the building itself has gone.