It is the kind of place that exists on maps and in monument registers before it fully exists, for most people, in any other sense. The name Gortnashingaun, likely derived from the Irish meaning something close to "the field of the foxes", gives a sense of the rural quiet in which this structure has been left to its own company.

Beyond the fact of its existence as a recorded chapel, the available detail is thin. What can be said in general terms is that rural Connacht is dense with the remnants of small pre-Reformation and post-medieval chapels, many of them reduced to low stone footprints or partial gable walls, their precise histories undocumented or absorbed into local oral tradition. Some were associated with early Christian activity, others with the patterns of devotion that persisted quietly through the penal era, when formal Catholic worship was suppressed and communities gathered at outdoor mass rocks or in modest, inconspicuous buildings. Whether this particular structure fits any of those categories is not, at present, something the surviving record makes plain.