By 1841, the parish of Lisselton held just three resident Protestants against 2,355 Roman Catholics, and yet the Church of Ireland building apparently filled with three to four hundred worshippers during the summer bathing season, visitors drawn to the coast at nearby Ballybunion who needed somewhere to worship on a Sunday. It is an oddly seasonal existence for a place of religion, and one that makes the subsequent abandonment and decay feel almost inevitable.

The tower is the western belfry of a late eighteenth-century First Fruits church, so called because it was funded through the Board of First Fruits, a body that used ecclesiastical revenues to finance Church of Ireland building projects across the country. The name Lisselton derives from the Irish Lios Eiltín, meaning the fort of Eiltín, a saint whose feast day fell on 11 December and who is generally associated with Kinsale. The church was almost certainly built on the site of a much older medieval parish church, one that appears by name as early as the ecclesiastical taxation of 1302 to 1306, when the church of Liseltyn was valued at 26 shillings and 8 pence per annum. The medieval parish's advowson, meaning the right to appoint its vicar, belonged to the priory of Rattoo. By 1460, that vicarage had become entangled in a papal complaint: a clerk named Dermot O'Connor petitioned Rome alleging that Edmund MacElligott, the perpetual vicar, had wasted the goods of the vicarage, committed simony and perjury, and openly kept a concubine. Over the following century the rectory revenues passed through a sequence of Elizabethan and Jacobean grants, touching figures as varied as Gerald, Earl of Desmond, a man named John Souche, and eventually Theobald Bourke, Baron of Castleconnell.

The tower still stands to its full height, though the north-eastern corner of the crenellated parapet has collapsed and a crack runs from that point down to a second-floor window. The entrance on the north elevation, a two-centred pointed doorway of dressed limestone, was sealed with plywood at the time of survey in 2010. On the east face, the ragged stubs of the nave wall survive where they once joined the tower, and a blocked archway marks where the interior passage between tower and church was later cemented over. Patches of the original lime render cling to the interior, and the pointed openings at second-floor level may originally have held louvres rather than glazing. The nave itself is gone, leaving the tower in the ambiguous position of being both ruin and, structurally at least, something close to intact.