The explanation is straightforward once you know to look for it, the entire church was rebuilt at some point, and the window ended up in the wrong place relative to the new structure. It is the kind of architectural slip that centuries of weather and moss can obscure, but here it remains legible in stone.

The site, set within a large graveyard on a steep east-facing slope about two miles north-west of Ennis, has no firm documentary origin. Its foundation is sometimes attributed to a St Conald, or Connal, though no early written sources confirm this. By 1302 to 1306 it was recorded in taxation documents as Ecclesia de Drumleb, and it went on to serve as the medieval parish church of Drumcliff, a parish that encompassed both Ennis town and Clonroad. The fabric of the church reflects its layered development: the present structure dates mainly to the fifteenth century, but the south wall and its windows have been assigned an eleventh-century date by the antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp, while the east gable belongs to the later phase. The church was still functioning well into the post-Reformation period; in 1622, Bishop John Rider of Killaloe recorded that the Protestant incumbent was one Thomas Prichard, described as a grave minister and preacher, inducted in 1617. The building that housed his congregation shows considerable sophistication for a rural parish church: the east wall carries a twin-light mullioned ogee-headed window with a square hood-moulding, there is an aumbry (a small recessed cupboard used to store liturgical vessels) at the south end of the east wall, and the south doorway retains a drawbar-slot, the groove cut into the jamb to receive a timber bar that would secure the door from inside. Perhaps most intriguing is a blocked window in the south wall whose dressed stonework is still visible, evidence that the church once extended further east before the current east gable was inserted.

The ruined stump of a round tower stands roughly ten metres to the north, a reminder that this was once a site of some early ecclesiastical importance. Both the church and the tower are national monuments in State care.