B. Yeats, whose grave sits in the churchyard beneath Ben Bulben. Few pause to consider what lies beneath the church itself, or rather what no longer lies there at all. The medieval churches known to have stood on the south bank of the Drumcliff River, roughly five hundred metres east of where the river opens into Drumcliff Bay, have left no trace at ground level. They are known only through documentary records, a seventeenth-century map, and a fragment of local tradition.

The site's ecclesiastical history stretches back to 574, when St Colmcille, the sixth-century monk better known elsewhere as Columba, founded a monastery at Drumcliff. Early sources make clear that there was more than one church here, and later annals record the consequences of that prominence. The Annals of Connacht note that in 1267 'Drumcliff was completely burned, with its churches.' In 1315, according to the Annals of Lough Cé, the wife of Aodh O Domhnaill, King of Tír Conaill, led gallowglasses, professional mercenary soldiers drawn largely from Hebridean and Ulster families, and members of the Clann Muirchertaigh in an attack on 'the churches of Druim-Cliabh,' during which clerics and coarbs, hereditary successors to a monastery's founding saint, were plundered. The Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656 still show two churches at Drumcliff; one appears to occupy roughly the same position as the Church of Ireland building erected in 1809, while a second is plotted a short distance to the east. That the 1809 church may genuinely overlie an earlier structure is supported by a note recorded by John O'Donovan in the 1836 Ordnance Survey Letters: 'There is a tradition that an old church stood where the Protestant church of Drumcliffe now stands, which was called Teampull Buide.' The name, meaning the yellow church, suggests a distinct and remembered identity, even if nothing of its fabric survives.