It is, in fact, the infilled and sealed remains of a church, its interior long since buried under rubble and capped over. What makes the site peculiar is not the ruin itself, but the layers of use and reuse compressed into it: an early medieval monastery, a parish church, a school, a private mausoleum, and now something that resembles none of those things. Four high crosses survive in the graveyard, the tall carved stone monuments associated with early Irish Christianity, and one of the more quietly startling details here is that the lintel which once sat above the church's west doorway turns out to be a repurposed cross shaft, with stone carving still visible on its underside. It now rests at the base of one of those standing crosses.

The history of the place involves a notable amount of institutional reshuffling. According to the historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, the church served as the parish church of Whitechurch down to the Reformation, and before the year 1300 it had been appropriated, along with its entire parish, by the Priory of Inistioge, an Augustinian house a few miles to the south-east. The medieval church itself did not survive long after the Reformation; by around 1780, its walls had been razed and the stone carried off to build a school a short distance to the north. That school was later converted into a mausoleum by the Osborne family of Annefield and Kilmacoliver, who had also reserved the eastern portion of the church enclosure, secured with a cross wall and an iron-barred door, for their exclusive use. Ordnance Survey letters from 1839 describe the building as roofless and roughly twenty-four feet long by fourteen feet wide, with a square doorway in the west gable but no window. By Carrigan's time it was already being called an unsightly ruin, and the present state of the structure, sealed under concrete and standing less than a metre high, suggests the process of erasure has continued steadily since.