St. Michael's Church of the Archangel was already gone by the mid-seventeenth century, levelled so completely that even the antiquarians who came later could find no trace of the building itself, only the ground where it had been. What survives is the burial ground, still bearing the saint's name, quietly occupying its corner of the city while the church it once served has left almost no physical mark at all.

The church appears in an inquisition of Limerick churches as early as 1200 to 1201, placing it among the oldest recorded ecclesiastical sites in the city. It stood outside the West Water Gate, beyond the medieval walls on the western side, which was an unusual position for a parish church serving what records later called the New Town. A map drawn by Hardiman in 1590 shows the building with a side aisle and a battlemented tower, the kind of fortified church architecture common in late medieval Ireland, where towers doubled as places of refuge. By 1615, however, the church and chancel were described as ruinous. The antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp, drawing on the White Manuscripts, recorded that the church was entirely destroyed during the Cromwellian period, with a reference dated to 1658. Earlier records suggest the site had long been significant to Limerick's merchant families. Martin Thomas Arthur mentioned it in his will of 1376, and Geoffrey Galwey left a bequest of 6 shillings and 8 pence to the church in 1445. By 1827, when Fitzgerald surveyed the city, the parish of St. Michael encompassed the whole of the New Town and held 15,068 inhabitants according to the 1821 census, yet efforts to rebuild the church had repeatedly stalled.

The cemetery remains accessible off James's Street, close to Bank Place in Limerick city. There is no church to look for; the site was levelled long ago and nothing of the structure survives above ground. What rewards a careful visitor is the layered ordinariness of the place, a working burial ground whose name quietly carries several hundred years of ecclesiastical and civic history. The feast day of St. Michael the Archangel falls on the 29th of September, a date noted in the White Manuscripts in connection with this particular parish.