Shrule itself sits close to the boundary between Mayo and Galway, beside the Black River where it leaves Lough Mask, and the presence of a ruined ecclesiastical site here is entirely in keeping with a settlement that has seen an unusual amount of history move through it for a place of its size.

Shrule has early Christian associations and later became the site of a Dominican friary founded in the thirteenth century, reflecting the wave of mendicant orders that established themselves across Connacht during the medieval period. The village is also remembered for a grim episode from 1642, when a large group of Protestant settlers, travelling under a promise of safe conduct during the chaos of the 1641 rebellion, were massacred at the river crossing here. Whether this ruined church is connected to those older ecclesiastical layers, or represents a later foundation on the same ground, is the kind of question that the fabric of the building, closely read, might begin to answer. Ruined churches in the west of Ireland often preserve traces of successive phases of use: cut stonework reset into later walls, windows blocked or enlarged, grave markers crowding up against foundations that predate them by centuries.