That name points to an early Christian monastery, long vanished above ground, and to a saint whose identity is tangled enough to appear twelve times over in medieval lists of holy figures. The place is Taghshinny, from the Irish Teach Sinche, and what survives there, set in level pasture about ten metres west of a stream, is a layered ecclesiastical site where an eighteenth-century Church of Ireland building occupies the probable footprint of a medieval church, and where two early Christian cross-slabs, flat stones carved with a cross design as grave markers or devotional objects, still anchor the site to its earliest phase.

The annals record a church at Taghshinny in the 1220s, possibly linked to the monastery on Inchcleraun, an island in Lough Ree to the west. The founding saint, Sineach, whose feast day falls on the 20th of April, may be the same figure associated with Inis-Clothrann, that same Lough Ree island. The name itself is thought to derive from sean, meaning old, and was common enough among early Irish saints to generate a list of twelve separate, largely unattested bearers of the cult. Scholarly work by Pádraig Ó Riain has suggested a more elaborate web of connections: the monastery at Taghshinny may have been associated with a figure called Díona, described in a medieval tract on the mothers of the saints as a daughter of the king of the Saxons and mother of the sons of Brachan, king of the Britons and name-giver of Brycheiniog in south Wales. Ó Riain further proposes that a Díne daughter of Bracán was counted among the four cailleacha, meaning nuns, of the Síol Maine of Longford and Westmeath, alongside Sineach herself. Whether these figures represent historical women, symbolic genealogical connections, or later hagiographical invention is now impossible to say with certainty, but they locate a quiet Longford graveyard within a surprisingly wide early medieval network.

One of the two cross-slabs remains standing in the eastern quadrant of the graveyard. The other, damaged and fragmented, was removed in 1999 by the National Museum of Ireland and is now held at Kildare Street in Dublin for safe keeping.