What gives the site its particular character is not just the ruin itself but the name attached to the surrounding area, Knocknagranshy, which points back to a system of ecclesiastical farming that shaped the Irish landscape in ways that are easy to overlook. A grange was an outlying farm or estate managed by a monastic house, and the granges of medieval Ireland were often busy, productive places long before the churches associated with them fell into disrepair.

The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1904 to 1905, noted that Knocknagranshy was one of the granges listed in a charter of 1185, tying the site to the organised church landholdings that followed the Norman arrival in Ireland. The place turns up again, more dramatically, in a legal record from 1319, when a violent encounter took place at what the record calls Nywegraunge, near the Abbey of Magio. Two men, Henry Hammond and Alex de Rupe, came to blows there. De Rupe inflicted two wounds; Hammond gave three and then fell dead. At that point, Hammond's alumnus, a term suggesting a ward or foster pupil, killed de Rupe with a lance. The inquiry that followed determined that all three men involved were felons, and their lands were forfeit to the Crown. It is the kind of episode that survives only in a plea roll entry, a brief administrative note that happens to preserve something genuinely strange. The place name appears again in a 1584 inquisition, recorded as Cnocknegranshye, showing the site still identifiable and still being formally noted nearly three centuries later.

The site is accessible as a disused graveyard on Grange Hill, and alongside the church ruin there is a holy well known as Toberlaughten, a name that likely incorporates the Irish word for a flagstone or flat surface, though its precise meaning here is not entirely clear. Visitors should expect an unmanicured setting; this is not a managed heritage site but a quiet, overgrown place where the church walls and the well survive together in the south-west corner of the graveyard. The well is recorded separately in the archaeological survey, suggesting it was considered a distinct feature in its own right rather than simply an adjunct to the church.