The seventeenth-century Down Survey, one of the earliest systematic mappings of Irish land, recorded the church's position here, but the precise ground it once occupied is now so thoroughly covered by modern burials that direct investigation is effectively impossible. A fragment of an ogee-headed window, the kind of ornately curved Gothic opening associated with later medieval ecclesiastical building, was turned up during a graveyard clean-up, suggesting that something older and more substantial once stood on this quietly unremarkable site.

The priory's history is tangled with a long-running question of identification. Ordnance Survey cartographers placed a Benedictine foundation at Kilcommon in the Kilnamanagh Upper Barony, but scholars Gwynn and Hadcock argued this was mistaken, following the historian Orpen in locating the correct site at Kilcommon in the parish of Caher, in south Tipperary. The foundation date is given as around 1200, and records suggest it continued into the reign of Edward III. Its probable end came not through dramatic suppression but through institutional neglect: in 1332, Glastonbury Abbey, the great Somerset monastery to which the priory was likely affiliated, lost much of its Irish property, and the Kilcommon house appears to have been quietly abandoned not long afterwards. A priory that outlasted its patron's reach by only a few decades, then slipped gradually beneath the ground, leaving almost nothing above the surface except a single curved fragment of dressed stone.