The site is known as Templenoe, or An Teampall Nua, meaning "the new church", a name that has carried a certain irony for centuries. At some point before 1895, a T-shaped Catholic chapel that had been constructed directly against the medieval church's northern wall was dismantled entirely, and the ground it once covered is now occupied by tombs and graves, the earliest dated 1881. The medieval structure outlasted its own addition, and the graveyard has quietly swallowed the evidence.

The church's origins reach back to the fifteenth century. A Royal Irish Academy manuscript records that both Templenoe and the nearby Cappanacush castle were built by Cor, grandson of Macarius, of the Sliocht Mac Crah, a branch of the O'Sullivan Mores, one of the most powerful Gaelic lordships in Munster. This figure has been identified as Conchur O'Sullivan, whose active period fell before around 1450. By 1576, a fiant, which is a type of royal warrant used in Tudor Ireland to record grants and transactions, notes the leasing of half the rectory of "Templenoe, alias New Church" to a Thomas Clinton. The church was still in serviceable repair at the time of a Royal Visitation in 1615, appeared in a diocesan listing of parochial churches in 1622, and by 1633 a minister named Edwardus Grayne was recorded as serving both Templenoe and a neighbouring parish called Killcroghan. Within roughly a century of that record, the building had fallen into ruin; Charles Smith, writing in 1756, found it already derelict.

The graveyard looks southward over the Greenane Islands in Kenmare Bay, which gives the site an orientation that feels more contemplative than coincidental. What remains above ground is a layered kind of place: a medieval foundation, the ghost of a later chapel visible only in the positioning of nineteenth-century graves, and the bay spread out beyond.