The site appears on the 1841 to 1842 OS map as a functioning church surrounded by a graveyard, but by the time the later edition was produced, the building itself had been reduced to a label in parentheses: "Church (site of)". That small cartographic shift, from present structure to remembered outline, is often all that survives of a rural Irish ecclesiastical site.

The graveyard, however, appears to have persisted even as the church disappeared. This pattern is common in North Kerry and across Ireland more broadly, where medieval or early modern parish churches fell into ruin or were demolished, leaving behind only the burial ground that had grown up around them. Such sites can predate any surviving documentation by centuries, their origins sometimes reaching back to early Christian foundations that were later absorbed into the medieval parish network. The Lissycurrig site was recorded as part of C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which systematically documented monuments of this kind across the region.