Alongside it, worked into the top of the south wall, sit a sharpening stone and two fragments of a quern, the kind of hand-operated grinding stone used to mill grain. These objects did not arrive there by accident or by time. They were placed deliberately during a reconstruction carried out by the Office of Public Works, and their presence raises an immediate question about what, exactly, visitors are looking at when they stand inside the roofless walls of the parish church of Templemolaga.

The honest answer is: mostly a reconstruction. The building was already reported as being in ruins in 1615, and by the time restorers set to work, very little of the original fabric survived above ground. Only the basal course of the walls is considered original. The west wall was rebuilt entirely, and not necessarily along its original line. The entrance in the south wall does not appear to be in its original position either. What does survive, and what makes the site genuinely interesting, are traces of what came before. The original masonry and a plinth at the base of the south wall suggest Romanesque construction, meaning the church likely dates from the twelfth century or thereabouts, when that style of rounded arches and decorative stonework was prevalent in Ireland. The antiquary Windele, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, described a doorway at the west end that still had one jamb standing, its external angle shaped into a column. That doorway is gone now, but five of its roll-moulded blocks, Romanesque in character, were noted in 1995 built into the inner face of the graveyard's west wall. A capital from a column was also recorded in a separate, earlier church that stands about three metres to the south. The site sits within a wider early ecclesiastical enclosure, suggesting a long sequence of religious activity on this ground, with the ruined parish church representing only one phase of it. A smaller secondary structure, with noticeably thinner walls, was added onto the east end of the main church at some point, though no cut-stone jambs survive at its entrance.