The church, dating from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, almost certainly occupies the site of a medieval parish church dedicated to St James, a place of worship that was already old enough by 1606 to be named in a royal land grant. That document, recorded in a grant to Sir Oliver Lambert, described it simply as a small chapel or church belonging to the town of Kilbeggan and to the parishioners of the adjoining monastery. The language is matter-of-fact, but the implication is significant: even in the early seventeenth century, this was understood as a place with an established community attached to it.

The connection to the Cistercian monastery of Kilbeggan, whose remains lie roughly 190 metres to the south-south-west, runs through the history of the site. The patron's day here fell on the 24th of July, the eve of the feast of St James, a calendar detail that points to the continuity of local religious practice long after formal institutions shifted around it. The graveyard itself is a long rectangle, approximately 95 metres north to south and 45 metres east to west, enclosed by a stone wall built after 1700 and entered through a gate at the north-east corner. Most of the memorials inside are post-1700 in date, which makes the recent unearthing of a sixteenth or seventeenth century graveslab in the eastern section all the more striking. It belongs to one John Nelson, and its discovery is a reminder that the visible surface of a graveyard rarely tells the whole story of what lies beneath it.