That absence is itself worth noting. Many rural ecclesiastical sites in Ireland accumulated layers of documentation over the centuries, from monastic annals to estate surveys to Victorian antiquarian visits, but Listerlin's church has attracted remarkably little of that attention, leaving it as one of those places that exists more as a point on a map than as a story.

Listerlin as a place-name is thought to derive from the Irish, and the area sits within a part of Kilkenny that was shaped by Anglo-Norman settlement from the twelfth century onward, a period that saw the establishment or rebuilding of many small parish churches across the Irish countryside. These were typically simple single-nave structures in local stone, serving dispersed rural communities, and a great number of them fell out of use following the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after which their graveyards often continued in use long after the buildings themselves were abandoned to ivy and field walls. Whether Listerlin follows that pattern precisely is difficult to say without closer examination of the fabric itself.