The main road curves northward and a southern road bends gently away, and between them, at the centre of the resulting arc, sits the site of the old medieval church. The trapezoidal shape of the modern village, formed by four converging roads, may well trace the outline of an early monastic enclosure, oval or roughly circular, the kind of boundary that enclosed the earliest Irish monasteries and whose ghost can sometimes be read in a landscape long after the buildings have gone.

The place name preserves a good deal of this early history. Its ancient form, according to the historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, was Cill Manach Droichit, meaning Kilmanagh of the Bridge, and the monastery itself is said to have been founded around the year 500 by St. Natál, most probably a son of Aenghus mac Nadfraoich, King of Cashel, who was slain in 489. Natál became the local patron, his feast day falling on the 31st of July. Carrigan also identified several entries in the Annals of the Four Masters, spanning 780 to 843, that appear to record the same monastery under the names Cill na manach and Cill-Mannach. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656 show the settlement as three houses and a church, with the townland described in the accompanying terrier as unforfeited, its proprietor in 1640 listed as the Countess of Ormond. The medieval church itself was eventually demolished around 1809, its stone reportedly carted off to build the local parsonage, a fate that was not unusual for older ecclesiastical buildings in the post-Reformation period. A Church of Ireland building had already replaced it in the late eighteenth century. One remnant of the earlier structure survives: a block of limestone set into the north wall of the graveyard, decorated with punch tooling characteristic of the late medieval period, a small and easy-to-miss detail that carries the whole weight of the site's longer story.