When the Ordnance Survey Letters noted it in 1840, the writers recorded that the church stood on the glebe, the plot of land historically attached to a parish for the support of its clergy, and that an old graveyard alongside it was still very much in use. The continuity is almost matter-of-fact in the record, yet behind it lies an unusually tangled past.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1904 to 1905, pieced together the earlier documentary trail for this place under its older name, Kilmurry. References to it appear as far back as 1291 and 1302, when it was recorded as Kilmehurrok, a parish within the barony of Clanwilliam. In 1325, a legal dispute over the lands of Kilmoroke was heard in the Plea Rolls, the parties being Ade de Gouly and Bichard Perpoint, with the case hinging on the earlier tenure of de Gouly's great-grandfather, one Begin Le Flemyng. By 1410 the church was dedicated to St Mary Magdalen, and by 1418 it was held by the Prior of Athissell, an Augustinian house in County Tipperary. The land changed hands more than once across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: in 1551 a grant was made to Bart. Cusack, and by 1633 the holding described as Killingally, alias Kilmahallock, was associated with the Bishop of Killaloe. By 1586 a survey by Peyton was calling it Temple Moyrry. Westropp noted that the modern church had occupied the old site since 1810, a date broadly consistent with what the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded a generation later.

The site sits within the civil parish of Newcastle, and the graveyard that was already old in 1840 remains the most legible trace of its long history. Visitors with an interest in early ecclesiastical geography or medieval land tenure will find the accumulated place-name variants alone, Kilmehurrok, Kilmoroke, Temple Moyrry, Kilmeremagdalyn, a small lesson in how thoroughly the documentary record can obscure a single continuous location. The graveyard is the most accessible part of the site and rewards careful attention to older stone, though specific features should be noted on the ground rather than anticipated in advance.