The elevation of the site is the kind of detail that rewards a second look: raised ground in an Irish ecclesiastical context often signals centuries of accumulated burial, a landscape slowly lifted by the dead. The church is modest, quietly anomalous, the sort of place that passes for an ordinary green space until you notice what is embedded in the stonework.

The documentary record for this site reaches back to 1275, when a medieval administrative text known as the Crede Mihi recorded the chapel at Artaine as one of three attached to the Church of Finglas. By 1532, Archbishop Alen's Reportorium viride, a survey of church properties compiled for the Dublin archdiocese, identified the chapel as being dedicated to St Nicholas. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed land record compiled in the aftermath of the Cromwellian conquest, mentions the chapel again, suggesting it remained a recognisable landmark well into the seventeenth century. Inside the ruin, excavation or survey work recovered fragments of sixteenth-century floor tiles, indicating that the building was fitted out with some degree of care during that period. By 1837, when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map was drawn, the church was shown standing at the centre of a square-shaped graveyard measuring roughly 38 metres by 34 metres.

The site sits within what is now a public park, which makes it freely accessible. The raised ground and the outline of that near-square enclosure are still perceptible on the ground, and the memorial slabs fixed to the exterior walls are worth reading carefully. The inscriptions span more than a century, from 1711 through to 1827, and give some texture to the local community that continued to use the site long after the church itself had fallen out of regular use. The floor tile fragments are not visible to a casual visitor, but knowing they were once here adds something to the experience of standing inside the roofless shell of a building that was already old when the Tudors were on the throne.