The saint it commemorates, Ibar or Iobhar of Begerin, is considered one of the most mythologised figures in the Irish church, his story layered with legend to a degree that makes any simple biography impossible. That tension between the verifiable and the legendary runs through the site itself: tradition insists there was an early church here, but no physical evidence has yet confirmed it.

What the historical record does show is a medieval parish in continuous use long before the present building arrived. A visitation carried out in 1615 by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, found the church impropriate to St. Selskar's, meaning its revenues were assigned elsewhere rather than to its own incumbent. David Browne was serving as priest at the time, and Ram recorded that both the church and chancel were in reasonable repair. The building standing today replaced whatever preceded it and was constructed between 1760 and 1766. Beneath it, though, older fabric survives in fragments. Archaeological monitoring of groundworks outside the west doorway uncovered a culvert containing human bone, and a wall fragment running beneath the west wall of the present church, over 0.6 metres wide, which may represent the remains of the medieval building. The ceramics recovered dated only to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so the wall's precise age remains uncertain, its origins quietly unresolved under the Georgian stonework above.