In the middle of a graveyard in County Kildare, a low, heavily overgrown rectangle of mortared stone is all that physically remains of a church with a surprisingly long and eventful paper trail. The walls stand no more than forty centimetres above the surrounding ground on the outside, though the interior sits a full metre higher than the graveyard itself, giving the ruin a slightly sunken, enclosed quality. The structure measures seventeen metres east to west and five metres wide, modest dimensions that hint at a modest rural parish church, the kind that would have served a small agricultural community and attracted little attention beyond the immediate locality.

The site's history stretches back to the Anglo-Norman reorganisation of Irish ecclesiastical life. Clonshanbo appears in a grant of 1174 to John de Hereford, and his family subsequently handed over the churches of their barony of Ikeaty to the Knights Hospitallers, a military religious order that had established a significant presence in medieval Ireland. By 1302, a papal taxation survey recorded the Hospitallers as rectors here, valuing the vicarage at thirty shillings. When Henry VIII dissolved the Hospitallers in 1540, the church and its income passed to the Crown, and within a few years the place had acquired a minor administrative notoriety. In 1543, the vicar Richard Birmingham was reported to the Barons of the Exchequer at Dublin Castle for failing to comply with a royal statute requiring him to teach English to his parishioners, a policy that was part of the broader Tudor effort to extend English language and culture into Gaelic and Anglo-Norman Ireland. The church was still functioning, at least nominally, when it was recorded in the Civil Survey of 1654, but by 1657 an official inquisition was already describing it as a ruin. Whatever decline had overtaken the building was apparently swift and decisive.