Ruined chapels are not unusual in Ireland, of course, but this one carries an extra layer of obscurity: even the formal record of its existence remains, for now, largely inaccessible to the general public. What survives on the ground is, in a sense, ahead of what survives in the archive.

The word "cahpel" in the site's designation is likely a phonetic or scribal rendering of "chapel", a small place of Christian worship, often pre-Reformation in origin, that served a local rural community. Mayo has a deep tradition of such structures, many of them associated with early medieval saints or with patterns, the Irish devotional gatherings held at sacred sites on a patron saint's feast day. Brodullagh itself is a sparsely documented townland, and without fuller records it is difficult to say with confidence when this chapel was built, by whom, or when it fell out of use. What can be said is that ruined chapels of this kind in the west of Ireland frequently date from the medieval period, and that many were quietly abandoned following the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, left to grass and weather rather than formally demolished.