The Cistercians were a reform-minded monastic order whose Irish houses were typically austere in plan and decoration; this one, known as the abbey of Chore or St. Mary of Chore, has been so thoroughly absorbed into later building that a visitor could pass the graveyard without any sense of what lies beneath the present church.

The abbey was founded in 1180, and what makes its origins slightly unusual among Irish Cistercian houses is that it was almost certainly founded by the Irish rather than by Anglo-Norman settlers, who were responsible for establishing many comparable houses in the same period. By 1541, when English commissioners were surveying monasteries earmarked for dissolution under the Reformation, jurors recorded that the abbey church had also served as a parish church, and that the remaining buildings on the one-acre site were being used for farming. Suppression followed in 1543. The building's decline did not end there: in 1580 the Seneschal of Imokilly, a regional official in east Cork, took refuge in the abbey and was expelled, an episode that was said to have caused considerable damage. By 1615 the complex was described as being in ruins. What remained standing did not survive much longer. The last remnants were demolished to clear the site for the construction of the present church, a fact recorded by the topographer Samuel Lewis writing in 1837.

The graveyard around the Church of Ireland church does retain a small number of stones recovered from the abbey, among them a late medieval door head and a fragment of circular shafting, the kind of rounded stonework associated with column construction in Romanesque or transitional-period architecture. They sit without fanfare among the gravestones, the only physical trace of an institution that once shaped the religious and agricultural life of the surrounding townland for nearly four hundred years.