Small portions of wall, they noted, and ground so thoroughly disturbed by generations of grave-digging that even the foundations could no longer be traced. The church they were trying to locate was known as Teampall Ratha Uachtair, the Church of Ratha Uachtair, and its very name pointed to something older beneath it: a rath, the type of circular earthen enclosure that served as a farmstead or settlement in early medieval Ireland. The parish took its modern name, Outrath, from that same earthwork, and local tradition held that the church had been built inside it. By the time anyone thought to write any of this down, both the rath and the church had effectively vanished.

What the place lacked in surviving fabric it made up for in institutional history. According to the historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, the church held a prebend, a form of ecclesiastical income attached to a cathedral chapter, from at least the early fourteenth century and possibly for two centuries before that. On 19th October 1386, a man named Robert Sutton was appointed by the King to the Prebend of Oghterath in the Cathedral Church of St. Canice of Kilkenny, one of several early name-forms that cluster around the same place. In the following century the parish was absorbed into the Chancellorship of the Diocese, a further administrative step that effectively dissolved its independent standing. The church itself had been dedicated to St. Patrick, and whatever structure once marked that dedication had long since been reduced to the faint disturbances in the soil of a roughly triangular graveyard on the south-east edge of which the ruins are recorded as lying.