The place itself is unassuming in its setting, the kind of slight dip in the landscape that early monastics often favoured, sheltered from prevailing winds and apart from the immediate world around them.

Local tradition, preserved in the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools' Manuscripts collection, holds that St Tigernach of Clones founded a monastery at Templetate. Tigernach, who died in 549 according to the annals and is associated with the important monastic site at Cluain Eois, now Clones, appears here in a secondary tradition, one of those persistent local memories that neither archaeology nor documentary history can fully confirm or dismiss. Attached to the church site was a burial ground, positioned close to where a cluster of farm buildings was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1834. The graveyard is said to have been in use until around 1830, and local memory was specific enough to name the last person interred there as Brady. By 1946, when the site was examined, no physical trace of the burial ground remained visible above ground. It had been absorbed entirely into the working agricultural landscape around it, leaving the tradition to carry what the earth no longer showed.