The building at Donaghmore that stands on a south-east-facing hillside above the River Slaney dates only to 1711, and whatever preceded it left no trace visible at ground level. Test trenching carried out in 2008 to the south of the present church found nothing of archaeological significance, meaning that centuries of religious and administrative life have left the landscape unmarked and largely unreadable to the eye.

The site has a long and layered past that its modest appearance gives no hint of. A church here is recorded as far back as the twelfth century, when it formed part of the diocesan lands of Glendalough, the monastic city in the Wicklow Mountains whose influence spread across a wide portion of the province. After 1216 the property passed into the hands of an episcopal manor, and it was later granted to the dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, giving this rural riverside site a direct administrative connection to one of the capital's most significant ecclesiastical institutions. More intriguingly, the church appears to have been associated with a small borough, a formally designated settlement with particular legal and commercial rights, suggesting that Donaghmore was once a place of considerably more consequence than its present quietness implies. Medieval boroughs in Ireland were often modest affairs, established by Anglo-Norman landlords to encourage settlement and trade, and many of them shrank or disappeared entirely over the following centuries. That pattern seems to have played out here.