That combination, a Gaelic ecclesiastical foundation named for an anglophone settler family, gives this quiet ruin in the townland of Keel, County Kerry, an oddly layered identity before you even set eyes on the place. What you do set eyes on, if you visit the old graveyard there, is essentially a west gable and a stretch of south wall, two fragments of a medieval parish church that have stood more or less unchanged for at least two centuries.

By the time a surveyor recorded the ruins in 1841, the building had already been reduced to those two elements. The south wall, built of brown freestone mortared with lime and sand, ran to about 7.3 metres in surviving length and stood roughly 3 metres high. The west gable contained a doorway that the 1841 observer noted was not original, its outer face dressed with chiselled stone, its lintel measuring about 0.9 metres across. The same account mentioned that a pattern, the traditional Irish gathering of prayer and communal activity at a sacred site, had once been held here annually on the eleventh of February, though by that date no saint was remembered in connection with it. A later tradition, recorded in 1942, supplied one: St Carthage, said to have been born nearby and to have tended livestock on the slopes of Sliabh Mish as a boy, before being drawn to monastic life and eventually founding communities at what is now Castlemaine and at Coolcleane, some two miles distant. Whether that association is ancient or accumulated over time is unclear. The church itself appears in Elizabethan administrative records under various spellings, including Garrynlondry and Garrinlondrye. In 1576 and again in 1588, Queen Elizabeth issued 21-year leases, first to Thomas Clinton and then to Thomas Springe, over lands that included a moiety, meaning a half-share, of the rectories here. In 1605 James I granted similar rights to George Thornton of Limerick. By 1615, a Royal Visitation of the Diocese of Ardfert noted the vicarage as sequestered to a minister named Roger Davies and assessed it at three pounds, adding that the church was then standing in 'indifferent well' condition.

A survey carried out in 2012 found the ruins essentially as the 1841 account had left them. The west gable, though ivy-covered and losing its outer facing stones, still stands to full height, which is itself a small structural surprise given how thoroughly the pointing has gone. The south wall is in noticeably better condition. One detail worth looking for is the angled thickening at the south-west and north-west corners of the building, a battered or buttress-like feature that does not continue along the south elevation and has been heavily robbed out at the north-west corner. It is the kind of structural particularity that tends to go unnoticed but suggests, quietly, that the original builders were working to a considered design.