The tiny structure that once stood within an unenclosed graveyard in a band of woodland close to the River Nore was demolished in 1869 to make way for the Kenny Purcell monument, which now occupies its former footprint. What had been recorded in 1839 was already little more than foundations: a building measuring roughly 4.8 metres by 2.7 metres, with a single surviving doorway stone on the right-hand side of the south entrance, three feet high and fourteen inches thick, with a shallow reveal cut into its inner face. A local resident, quoted by the historian Carrigan writing in 1905, remembered the walls as built of rough stone, standing about four feet high, with no trace of a roof remaining. Carrigan interpreted the structure not as a church in any conventional sense but as a hermit's cell, a solitary enclosure of the kind associated with early Irish monastic practice.

The story of the site's fabric does not end with demolition, however. Roughly 280 metres to the west, within the grounds of Kilfera House, there is a round-headed doorway with imposts set into an enclosure entrance. The style is consistent with early 12th-century Romanesque work, and it is thought this doorway may have been removed from Saint Fiachra's church before or during its clearance, and later incorporated into the Kilfera House boundary as a kind of architectural keepsake. The 1839 Ordnance Survey map also recorded a feature labelled "St. Fiachra's Effigy" immediately south of the church, and Saint Fiachra's Well lies about 70 metres to the south-east of the graveyard. The 1900 revision of the OS map, meanwhile, marks the church site with a cross but appears to have placed it incorrectly, at a location that the earlier map shows as a small pond, a minor cartographic error that neatly illustrates how quickly the physical traces of a place can become confused once the structure itself is gone.