What makes the site quietly arresting is less its physical fabric than its administrative history: for centuries this modest rural church was one of thirteen sacerdotal prebends attached to St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, a designation meaning that its revenues supported a cathedral canon. That arrangement tied a small Fingal parish into the machinery of one of Ireland's most powerful ecclesiastical institutions, and the paper trail it left behind is unusually detailed for a place so easy to drive past.

The prebend of Clonmethan, known in medieval records variously as Gleann Meáin, Glynmethan, and Glinmechan, was established in 1190 by Archbishop Comyn. By 1230 King John had confirmed its possessions to the Archbishop of Dublin, and a taxation of 1302 to 1307 valued the prebend at 20 marks per annum. The church also served as a mother church to a daughter chapel at Fieldstown, 4.1 kilometres to the south, dedicated to St. Catherine the Virgin and Martyr. In 1474 the then-prebendary, Nicholas Dovedale, petitioned Parliament to note that the Fieldstown chapel was attracting pilgrims in considerable numbers, describing their visits as being "for the health and safety of their souls." Dovedale himself went on to secure eight years' leave of absence in 1475 to study at Oxford. His successors fared variously: Thomas Cranley was sued in 1414 for absenteeism, while Alexander Craike, prebendary and Dean of St. Patrick's, was promoted to the see of Kildare in 1560, the grant letter noting that the bishopric had been left impoverished by "continual and intolerable oppression of the Irish rebels." By 1630, Archbishop Bulkeley's visitation found the building standing but not "decent within," and recorded that no more than ten or twelve parishioners were attending services. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 described the church as "out of repaire," and by 1675 the parish had been united with five others by act of council.

The ruins sit within a graveyard whose western wall faces the public road, making them straightforward to locate. The church's situation on rising ground gives some sense of why the site was chosen, with views northward across the stream below. The glebe lands surrounding the church were formally established in 1716 when Archbishop King granted the prebendary and his successors a parcel of fields totalling roughly twenty acres, some of which still form part of the glebe today. Visitors interested in the medieval landscape of Fingal will find the site most rewarding in combination with a visit to the Fieldstown chapel ruins to the south, the two together giving some physical sense of the parish network that once answered to this corner of St. Patrick's Chapter.