The 18th-century Church of Ireland building that now occupies the centre of the burial ground may sit close to where the earlier church stood, and the whole layered succession, medieval, post-Reformation, Georgian, survives as a kind of compressed history in a single field beside a stream. What makes the site genuinely strange is not absence but survival in unexpected form: two architectural fragments, both found in rubble near the graveyard's northern wall, suggest the medieval church may have been a more complex structure than a simple rural chapel.

The annals record a church at Taghshinny as early as the 1220s, possibly connected to the monastery on Inchcleraun, an island site in Lough Ree with early medieval origins. By 1475, a priest named Thomas Macmurhyrtay was recorded as serving the parish church, and in 1542 the rectory was leased to Walter Tirrell of Dublin. The site appears on an early 17th-century map of Shrule barony, and a 1620 land grant to James McConnell Farrall carried the condition that he hold an annual fair at Taghshinny on 29 June, the feast of St Peter the Apostle. The 18th-century church may itself incorporate fabric from a 17th-century building erected by the Annelly family of Tennalick. Among the fragments found near the northern wall is a nearly square carved block bearing rosette decoration in each corner and, at its centre, an openwork triskele enclosed by a band of rope-moulding in false relief. The two lower rosettes appear unfinished, lightly incised rather than fully worked. This block has been interpreted as a possible air vent for a garderobe, a latrine shaft built into the thickness of a wall, which would suggest the medieval church once had domestic quarters or a residential tower attached. A fragment of a tracery window with a glazing groove was also found nearby. The graveyard additionally holds a cross-slab, fragments of a second cross-slab, and several 17th-century graveslabs, one of which is inside the later church building.