The walls of the old parish church at Farranreagh now stand little more than a metre and a half above ground on average, but that ground itself has risen considerably over time, lifted by generations of burials pressing in close to the masonry. The building is still there, just diminished and half-consumed, its stonework bonded with a gravelly mortar that contains fragments of marine shell, the kind of detail that places a building firmly in a coastal world where builders used whatever came to hand.

The church served the medieval parish of Valencia, known in Irish as Dairbhre, meaning Oak Island, within the Diocese of Ardfert. A church here called 'Darnery' appears in the Papal Taxation Lists of 1302 to 1306, giving it a documented medieval pedigree, and it may also have gone by the name 'Kildacom' at various points. By 1615 the vicarage was valued at £4, shared with Cahir and Kilkenan, and the incumbent was one John Calhan. A 1633 visitation record adds a more human note: the vicar at the time, Donell Ffanning, was flagged because his wife did not attend church. By 1622 the building had already been omitted from the diocesan church list, suggesting it was falling into neglect, though a mid-seventeenth century reference implies it may still have seen some use. It was confirmed as ruinous by the mid-eighteenth century. In 1815, a replacement church was built a short distance to the north, funded in part by a £500 grant from the Board of First Fruits, a body established to channel funds into Protestant church building and repair in Ireland. The rectangular shell left behind, measuring 12 metres by 5.3 metres internally, was already becoming a curiosity: when Thomas O'Connor inspected it in 1841, he recorded the side walls still standing at eleven feet, though the gables had been reduced to just two feet. The site also appears on a 1598 map from the Clancarthy Survey, marked alongside its graveyard and overlooking what is described as the 'haven of Beggennis', placing it firmly in the landscape of late Elizabethan Kerry.

The remains sit on the lower north-eastern slopes of Kilbeg, and the graveyard around them is still in use. The walls, built of roughly faced split stone with occasional white quartz facing, are now so heavily covered in grass that the medieval fabric is difficult to read clearly. A breach about two metres wide near the west end of the north wall may mark where the original entrance once stood, though even that is uncertain. What is more legible is the east gable, which at its base is over two metres thick, considerably heavier than the rest of the structure, and steps inward noticeably about 0.7 metres above the present external ground level, a feature that becomes easier to appreciate once you understand how much the surrounding earth has crept upward.