By 1840, the Ordnance Survey letters were already recording that 'no part of the old Church of this parish is now to be seen nor has been these many years', though the burial ground around it continued to receive the dead. What remains is a working cemetery wrapped around an absence, the footprint of a medieval building levelled so thoroughly that not a stone course survives above ground.

The church had a documented life stretching back to at least 1302, when it appears in ecclesiastical records under the name Wlys, listed with a Wide chapel in the deanery of Wethney. By the sixteenth century, the settlement was variously spelled Owlys and Ullay in the fiants, the administrative records of the Tudor administration in Ireland. In 1542, a man named Nicholas Panning was granted Owlys; in 1551, a chaplain called Thady MacBrene was recorded at Ullay. By 1615 the church fell under the deanery of Tipperary rather than Wethney, suggesting some reorganisation of ecclesiastical boundaries in the intervening years. The antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1904 and 1905, noted that the building had been repaired at some point and situated the site within the graveyard near the railway line. Fitzgerald and McGregor, writing in 1826, were still able to describe ruins of both a church and a castle in the vicinity, which means the levelling happened sometime in the fourteen years between that account and the Ordnance Survey letters of 1840.

The graveyard itself remains in use and is traceable near the railway line at Oola. There is nothing architectural to examine once you arrive; the interest lies in the landscape reading, in standing within a burial ground and knowing that the building which gave it purpose and orientation was erased within living memory of the first proper mapping of Ireland. The site is catalogued in the Record of Monuments and Places, and anyone with a particular interest in ecclesiastical geography or the medieval parish network of County Limerick will find the documentary trail, even if the physical evidence has long since gone.