The structure may occupy ground that was once the site of a 'Dearteach', a term from early Irish meaning roughly 'oak house', referring to a timber church of the early Christian period. The name surfaces in several Anglo-Norman documents, suggesting that even as Norman administrators were reshaping the landscape of Leinster, they were recording the memory of an older wooden foundation on this spot.

By the medieval period, the site formed part of the borough of Bray, one of the Norman planned towns established along the east coast. A subsequent Norman church foundation likely followed the timber one, and a further church was erected here in 1609, though nothing of that structure is visible in the fabric of the building today. The present parish church dates to the 19th century, and while it may incorporate elements of the 1609 building, no trace of that earlier phase can be identified above ground. What does survive are two graveslabs situated to the south of the church, belonging to Richard Whichil, who died in 1697, and Robert Burfield, who died in 1700. Flat memorial slabs of this kind were a common form of commemoration among the Protestant settler community in the decades following the Cromwellian and Williamite upheavals, and these two are among the few tangible remnants of the site's long use as a place of burial and worship. The layers here, from possible early timber oratory to Norman borough church to a building now stripped of its ecclesiastical function, compress several centuries of Bray's history into a single, unremarkable-looking plot.