It was known locally, at least as far back as 1839, as Cill Chormaic, Kill Cormac, a dedication to Saint Cormac that the surrounding peasantry kept alive in speech long after the structure itself had ceased to exist as anything more than a foundation. The site was only formally located by fieldwork in 1987, which is a curious inversion of the usual order: the maps came first and recorded nothing, the memory persisted, and the ground confirmed it last.

The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839, compiled as part of the great topographical survey of Ireland, described a small burying ground alongside the church foundation, the latter measuring roughly fifty-four feet in length by eighteen feet in breadth. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, gave slightly larger dimensions of fifty-seven feet long and twenty-four feet wide, with walls surviving to about two and a half feet thick, and noted that Kilcormaic had functioned as a full parochial church until the Reformation, after which its parish was absorbed into that of Donnoughmore. The difference in the two sets of measurements is modest enough to suggest both writers were working from the same deteriorating remains, viewed roughly sixty-six years apart, rather than from any structural record. Before the Reformation reshaped the ecclesiastical map of Ireland in the sixteenth century, a parish church of this kind would have served as the religious and civic centre of its immediate community, responsible for the sacraments, burials, and the rhythms of the liturgical year. That function, the burying ground beside it suggests, continued in some form even after the building itself fell out of use.