The building itself went up in 1740, its date recorded on a stone above the door, but the ground it stands on had already been a place of Christian worship for centuries before a single dressed stone of the current structure was laid. Nothing of that earlier church survives above ground; what you see today replaced something that had been quietly falling apart for decades.

The paper trail is instructive. A formal visitation conducted in 1615 by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, found the church and chancel in reasonable order, and recorded two priests attached to the parish, William Warren and Thomas ffleming. Within a few decades the picture had changed. The church appears in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, and by 1684 a man named Robert Leigh was describing it as being in poor repair. The 1740 rebuild came not long after the parish of Whitechurch was formally united with the neighbouring parish of Kilmokea in 1723, a consolidation that may have prompted the investment in new construction. The graveyard itself is rectangular, roughly forty metres east to west and thirty-five metres north to south, enclosed by masonry walls, with a later extension to the north adding further ground.

Among the quieter details worth noticing in the graveyard is a fragment of a medieval limestone grave slab, measuring roughly 78 centimetres by 42 centimetres. It retains a chamfered edge and a raised cross whose arms end in fleur-de-lis terminals, the stylised lily-like ornament common in ecclesiastical carving. It is a modest piece, broken and partial, but it is one of the few physical traces connecting the current, relatively modern site to whatever stood here before.