There is no doorway to examine, no carved stonework to photograph, no roofless nave filling with ivy. The chapel of St. Michael of the Naul, known in Latin records as Sancti Michaelis de Nalla, was almost certainly levelled around 1814 to make way for a Church of Ireland building on the same elevated site, and that replacement was itself demolished around 1939 to 1940. What remains is a square-shaped graveyard, a flattened outline visible only on aerial imagery, and a paper trail reaching back eight centuries to a Devonshire family who gave the place its Anglo-Norman character.

The name Naul comes from the Irish An Aill, meaning the cliff, a reference to the rock on which Naul Castle stands roughly 100 metres to the north, overlooking the Delvin River. That river is itself a boundary of unusual density: it separates Dublin from Meath, the parish of Naul from Clonalvy, the barony of Balrothery West from Duleek Upper, and the Diocese of Dublin from the Diocese of Meath. The church's origins lie with the Cruise family, who held the manor of Naul from at least 1185, when Stephen de Crues appears in Archbishop Alen's Register. According to later scholarship, an older Gaelic church already stood near the cliff before Stephen de Crues, whose surname derives from the French for cross and marks him as a crusading family, built or rebuilt the chapel before 1200. The church was subsequently drawn into the orbit of Llanthony Prima, an Augustinian priory in Monmouthshire, Wales, under the patronage of Hugh de Lacy and his son Walter. By 1211 a formal grant confirmed that Llanthony should hold the church of Naul along with churches at Garristown, Palmerstown, and elsewhere in Fingal. The arrangement generated income: the 1302 to 1307 Ecclesiastical Taxation of Ireland valued the church at £10 per annum. It also generated dispute. Around 1519, a petition recorded in Archbishop Cromer's Register describes one John Caddell and his chaplain appealing against the intrusion of the Llanthony canons into the chapel, claiming his family had celebrated divine service there from time immemorial. By 1630, Archbishop Bulkeley's visitation found the churches ruinous and reported that no more than eight people attended Protestant services in the parish, while mass was commonly said in the houses of Mr. Cadle and Mr. Cruce, the Cruise family of the castle.

A 1710 chantry chapel built by the Hussey family to the south of the medieval church site is the most tangible survivor of the story, and it reused the doorway and windows salvaged from the medieval building, making it the closest thing to a physical remnant of the original structure. The graveyard itself is the most accessible point of reference for a visitor. Naul Castle, also called Black Castle, is visible to the north, and a possible holy well known as Lady Well lies about 15 metres to the east-north-east of the church site. The outline of the demolished post-1700 church was still discernible on aerial imagery taken between 2011 and 2013, though nothing marks it at ground level. The surrounding landscape, with the Delvin River below, the castle on its cliff, and the mill sites recorded nearby, gives some sense of how tightly this small settlement was bound together across the medieval centuries.