The site was known as Inismocholmoc, meaning roughly 'Colman's Island', a dedication to an early Irish saint whose name became attached to the low valley where the Inch River runs east to west. The island element of the name is worth pausing over: the church sits in a low-lying position within the river valley, with the stream running some sixty metres to the south, suggesting a landscape that may once have been marshy or flood-prone enough to isolate this ground.

By 1179 the church was already listed as belonging to the diocese of Glendalough, placing it within a medieval ecclesiastical network that stretched across Leinster. The records become patchier after that, but a visitation carried out in 1615 by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, found no priest in place, and the condition of the building went unrecorded. A survey of 1630 described the church itself as ruinous, though the chancel was apparently still in repair at that point. The present church was built in 1831, and nothing of the earlier medieval fabric is visible at ground level today. The graveyard surrounding it, irregularly shaped and measuring roughly eighty metres east to west by thirty to forty metres north to south, may preserve something of the older enclosure, as such boundaries often outlast the structures they once surrounded.