The place is known today as Croughal, but its older identity lingers in the placename. The Down Survey maps of 1656 to 1659 record the townland as 'Conry and Cloghoule', and it is the second of those names, worn down through anglicisation, that became Croughal. The church itself sits within an ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of defined sacred boundary that characterises Early Christian monastic and church sites across Ireland, and the watery ground around it gave rise to the evocative local designation: the Island of Conry.

Two cross-inscribed slabs survive in association with the ruined church. One lies immediately south of what was once the doorway into Conry Church, the doorway itself now broken out and gone. The other sits roughly eight metres to the north-west of the ruins. Cross-inscribed slabs, sometimes used as grave markers and sometimes as devotional monuments, are among the more modest but durable traces of Early Christian religious life in Ireland, carved with incised crosses rather than the elaborate sculptural programmes of the great high crosses. By 1641, the lands of Conry and Cloghoule were in the hands of Henry Dalton, recorded in the Down Survey as an 'Irish papist', a designation that reflects the loaded religious and political categorisation of mid-seventeenth-century land surveys rather than anything remarkable about Dalton himself. The survey was compiled in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion and in anticipation of the Cromwellian land settlements that would follow.