But the ruined tower to the west complicates the picture considerably. That structure, thought to date from the fifteenth century, may have served as the residential tower of the Bishop of Limerick, or possibly the vicar's residence, and it stands at what was once the west end of a medieval parish church, Teampall Mainchín, dedicated to St. Munchin. That earlier church has been completely levelled; no surface trace of it remains. The nineteenth-century ruin was built, as Samuel Lewis noted in 1837, "near the site of the old church" with £800 from the Board of First Fruits in 1812, in what he described as the early English style, with a square tower and an octagonal spire of hewn stone. Two churches, separated by centuries, occupy essentially the same ground, and one has entirely erased the other.

The parish takes its name from the Irish Brú Rí, meaning "abode of kings", and the site has been accumulating ecclesiastical and secular claims since at least the thirteenth century. By 1302 the vicarage of Bruree was already listed in the Ecclesiastical Taxation of the Diocese of Limerick, valued at £5 6s. 8d. In 1242 the lands were seized from John de Marisco and his wife Mabel, a granddaughter of Richard de Burgh, before being restored to her. By 1289 the holding had passed to Robert de Mariscis, under warrant of Maurice and Eva de Lacy. In 1318, the vicar Reginald was robbed by one Patrick de Lees, a detail that suggests the living was worth taking notice of. By 1418, taxation records confirm that the Dean of Limerick was rector and presented the vicar; a century later, in 1503, a cleric named Ugo bound himself to the Apostolic Chamber for the first fruits of the vicarages of Bruree and Shandrum, in an arrangement tied to a rectorship elsewhere for the duration of his life. In 1700, the then vicar Lewis Prytherch left a precise account of the glebe land, noting 23 acres, 1 rood, and 16 perches in total, with the tower belonging to the Dean of Limerick and only five acres assigned to it. The patron saint of the parish, St. Munchin, whose feast falls on the 2nd of January, lends his name to a holy well lying just 130 metres to the north-east of the graveyard.

The site sits in the townland of Ballynoe, An Baile Nua, and the graveyard offers clear views north and east across the River Maigue towards the village of Bruree. The ruins of the castle tower are visible from the churchyard itself. St. Munchin's holy well, a short distance to the north-east, is worth seeking out as part of the same visit; holy wells, traditionally associated with local patron saints, were often sites of pattern days, communal gatherings held on or near a saint's feast day. The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the church, graveyard, and castle all depicted within the glebe land, a configuration that the earlier seventeenth-century Down Survey barony map corroborates, giving the site a legibility across centuries that rewards close attention to even a basic map.