What makes the site quietly strange is the pace of that disappearance, which can be measured almost decade by decade through the accounts of those who recorded it.

The church was known in Irish as Teampall Domhnaigh Mhóir, meaning roughly the church of the great Sunday or great assembly, and was dedicated to St. Patrick. According to the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, Donaghmore functioned as a distinct parish until the Reformation, when it was absorbed into the neighbouring parish of Fertagh. Before that consolidation, the church had been appropriated to Fertagh Priory at an early stage, placing it within the administrative and spiritual orbit of that Augustinian house. The building was divided into nave and chancel, the nave being the main body where a congregation would gather, and the chancel the narrower eastern section reserved for the clergy and altar. When a local observer named Moore recorded the structure in the 1870s, both elements were still legible: the nave ran to roughly 40 feet and the chancel to around 20 feet. By the time Carrigan wrote, only thirty years later, the nave had been entirely effaced and the chancel reduced to foundations alone. A visit in 1986 confirmed traces of the full rectangular outline, roughly 22 metres long and 6 metres wide, still detectable in the northern part of the irregularly shaped graveyard that surrounds the site. The graveyard itself remains in use, which means the land around these vanishing footings continues to carry its own quiet accumulation of history.