The ground beneath it was once associated with the Knights Templar, the medieval military order that held considerable landed interests across Ireland before its suppression in the early fourteenth century, and the site passed through several hands in the turbulent decades that followed the Reformation.

Gwynn and Hadcock identify Rathronan as a Templar manor, and the site surfaces again in the early Elizabethan period when Prior Massingberd of Kilmainham, during what is described as a brief tenure following the accession of Queen Elizabeth, leased out the tithes of Rathernonane among other places, a transaction recorded in Fiant Q.Eliz. 2208. Both Power, writing in 1908, and the Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled by John O'Flanagan in the 1830s, note that an earlier church once stood here, predating the current ruin by an unknown span. No physical trace of that earlier structure remains visible today, which makes the site a quietly layered one: a nineteenth-century ruin sitting over the footprint of something older, which itself sat on land that once belonged to one of medieval Europe's most controversial religious orders.

The church stands in a commanding position with open views in every direction, the kind of elevated placement that was chosen deliberately for early ecclesiastical sites and that gives some sense, even now, of why this particular hill was considered significant across so many centuries.