Many of Ireland's early ecclesiastical sites occupy prominent ridgelines or riverside positions that explain their founding logic at a glance, but Listerlin sits in the kind of tucked-away agricultural country where a ruin can go unremarked for generations, its stones slowly acquiring moss while the fields around it are ploughed and grazed in seasonal rotation.

Listerlin as a placename likely derives from the Irish, and the presence of a church here points to a parish or monastic foundation of some antiquity, probably medieval in origin, though the precise dating and dedication of the building remain unclear from what has been recorded. County Kilkenny has a dense concentration of such sites, a legacy of the diocese of Ossory and its long history of ecclesiastical organisation stretching back through the Anglo-Norman period and into the early Christian centuries before it. Churches of this type, often built in the Romanesque or later Gothic manner in cut limestone, frequently served small rural parishes whose populations have since shifted or dwindled entirely, leaving the fabric of the building to weather without the protection that active use provides.