Beside it, a shallow hollow worn into a neighbouring stone is said to be where pilgrims rested their heads while reaching out to touch the image. It is an oddly intimate detail, a physical trace of repeated, hopeful contact, and it survives in the remains of what is now just the chancel of a twelfth-century Romanesque church, plain in style, its nave long gone and its north and east walls largely rebuilt to about a metre in height. A single round-headed window sits high in the south wall, and the arch in the west wall, just under 1.8 metres wide, opens onto nothing.

The site's history reaches back considerably further than those Romanesque walls. St Tigearnach, whose father came from the Uí Bhairrce, a Leinster sept whose name survives in the Barony of Bargy in Wexford, and whose mother was of the Oirghialla, a kingdom between the Erne and the Upper Bann, is said to have founded a monastery here and died at Clones around AD 549 to 550. Later Lives of the saint describe his education at Whithorn and a visit to Rome to collect relics of Saints Peter and Paul. The monastery appears in the annals from 714, was plundered by Vikings in 836, and was destroyed by fire in 1095. From the 1140s it was probably reconstituted as an Augustinian abbey dedicated to Ss Peter and Paul. A remarkable object associated with the site is the Domhnach Airgid, an enshrined copy of the Gospels reputedly given to St Mac Caorthainn by St Patrick; inscriptions on its sides name John O Karbri, abbot of Clones who died in 1353, and John Barrdan as the craftsman who made the shrine. It is now in the National Museum of Ireland. By 1414 the abbey was impoverished enough that indulgences were granted to fund repairs to the church and cloister. It survived the general suppression of monasteries in 1539 to 1540 but had fallen far by 1629, when a lease described the remains as containing half an acre with one church half covered in straw, a kitchen, and various ruinous buildings. Around 1586 to 1587 Sir Henry Duke of Castlejordan had leased the premises from the Crown, and the property passed eventually through his widow Mary and her second husband Sir Francis Rushe to the Barrett-Leonard family, with whom it remained into the nineteenth century.

The church sits in a small graveyard that was once connected to the larger graveyard about 40 metres to the west, before Whitehall Street cut through and severed the link. The round tower, a separate monument, is built into the wall of that larger graveyard to the west, and a stone shrine stands within its south wall. Of the original church founded by Tigearnach nothing survives, and no trace remains of the Augustinian cloister or the transept church visible on the earliest map of Clones, dating from around 1590.