The seventeenth-century Down Survey, one of the earliest systematic mappings of Irish land, placed a church here, but the ground it once occupied has long since been absorbed by later burials. More intriguingly, the site was for a time misidentified by the Ordnance Survey as the location of a Benedictine priory, a monastic order following the Rule of Saint Benedict, associated with a community founded around 1200. That confusion persisted until scholars including Gwynn, Hadcock, and Orpen argued that the correct site was Kilcommon in the parish of Caher, in south Tipperary, not Kilnamanagh Upper Barony where the OS had pointed.

The priory in question appears to have been a dependency of Glastonbury Abbey in England, and the connection explains its eventual decline. When Glastonbury lost much of its Irish property in 1332, the priory at Kilcommon was probably abandoned not long afterwards, with evidence of its activity running only as far as the reign of Edward III. During a graveyard clean-up scheme, a fragment of an ogee-headed window, a late medieval window style characterised by its double S-curved arch, was initially thought to have been recovered from this site, raising the possibility that some trace of the medieval church survived. That attribution was later corrected: the window fragment belonged to Killea graveyard, not Churchquarter. Richard O'Brien addressed the full history of the priory in a 2003 paper in the Tipperary Historical Journal, consolidating what the physical and documentary record can actually support. The site, then, is one where the absence of visible remains is itself part of the story, a place where the archaeology has been quietly buried, misread, and slowly, carefully, re-examined.