The church is classified among the surveyed monuments of County Galway, which places it in a category of buildings considered to have archaeological or architectural significance, yet the details that would bring it properly into focus, its age, its builder, the precise form of its fabric, remain inaccessible through the usual channels.

The townland name itself offers a small thread worth pulling. Knockdoe, from the Irish Cnoc an Daimh, meaning the hill of the ox, was the site of the Battle of Knockdoe in 1504, in which Gearóid Mór FitzGerald, the eighth Earl of Kildare, led a large coalition force against Ulick Burke of Clanricard. It was one of the largest battles fought between Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lords on Irish soil, and the surrounding townlands carry that history in their names. Knockdoemore, the greater Knockdoe, sits within this contested and long-settled ground. Catholic church buildings in rural Galway were frequently constructed in the decades following Catholic Emancipation in 1829, when the legal barriers to building places of worship were finally lifted, and many such structures replaced earlier mass houses or outdoor mass rocks that had served congregations through the penal era. Whether this church belongs to that wave of post-Emancipation building, or to a later phase of Victorian ecclesiastical construction, is not currently determinable from available sources.