What gives the site a stranger, older gravity is what came before it: an early medieval church whose precise origins have largely slipped from the record, but whose associations point toward figures from Ireland's early Christian period that most people outside scholarly circles have never encountered.

The historian F. E. Ball, writing in 1900, noted that this earlier church on the Taney site was linked to two saints: St. Ossian and St. Lucan. These are not names that appear prominently in the popular canon of Irish saints, and relatively little survives about either figure in the wider historical record. The dedication of early Irish churches to local or regional saints, often figures venerated within a particular territory rather than across the island as a whole, was a common feature of the early Christian landscape, and such sites frequently became the nucleus around which later parishes developed. That pattern seems to hold here. The current building, constructed in 1760 and known as St. Nahi's, takes its name from yet another early saint associated with the Dundrum area, suggesting that the site accumulated layers of sacred association over many centuries before the present plain Georgian structure was raised.

The church sits in the Taney area of Dundrum, which is now thoroughly suburban but retains a small churchyard that rewards quiet attention. Visitors interested in the early medieval layers of the site will find the physical evidence modest; this is a place where the interest lies more in what is absent or obscured than in any dramatic visible remains. The 1760 building is a straightforward example of Church of Ireland architecture from that period, functional and unshowy. The surrounding churchyard contains older memorial stones, and it is worth moving slowly around the perimeter to take in the full extent of the site. Those coming specifically for the historical associations would benefit from reading Ball's 1900 account beforehand, as the local detail he recorded has not been widely repeated elsewhere.