The Church of Ireland building here replaced a medieval church dedicated to the parish of Rathronan, but even that predecessor was itself a replacement. When the Ordnance Survey Letters were compiled in 1840, the writer noted that the church pulled down to make way for the new structure around 1826 was itself not many half centuries old, meaning the truly ancient fabric of Rathronan had already been lost long before the nineteenth century arrived. The result is a layered site where the physical evidence of the earliest phases has been almost entirely erased, leaving only the ground itself as a kind of archive.

The name Rathronan appears in the historical record as far back as 1260, when a legal dispute between the dioceses of Lismore and Cashel over this and other Limerick churches was noted in the Calendar of Papal Letters. Antiquarian Thomas Westropp, writing in 1904 to 1905, traced the name through several variants across the medieval centuries: Ruthronan in 1260, Chapel of Maurice in 1291 and again in 1302, Rathrunan in 1410, Capella Mauricii alias Rathronan in 1418, and Rathronan in a 1452 rental. By 1645, the rectory of Rathronan also held jurisdiction over the chapel of Mount Temple at Athlea. The current ruined structure, recorded by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, is a Board of First Fruits church, built around 1825 to 1827. The Board of First Fruits was an ecclesiastical fund used extensively in early nineteenth-century Ireland to finance the construction of Church of Ireland buildings, producing a distinctive and often austere style. This example comprises a four-stage square tower adjoining a gabled three-bay nave of double height.

The ruins sit within a graveyard that, according to the 1840 Ordnance Survey account, was already described as large but little used as a cemetery even at that relatively early date. Visitors approaching the site should expect an atmospheric but unspectacular setting, the interest lying less in dramatic fabric and more in the accumulated history of the ground itself. The site is in County Limerick, within the historic parish of Rathronan, which straddled the old baronies of Shanid, Connello, and Glenquin. The graveyard is likely the most accessible element for those exploring the area, and older stones within it may preserve inscriptions worth examining closely.