Yet the ground it occupies carries a considerably longer story, most of which has been quietly erased.

Kilfithmone was once a medieval borough, a formal settlement with the administrative and commercial character that designation implied in the Middle Ages. The site was significant enough to appear in the ecclesiastical taxation of the Diocese of Cashel in 1302, a document recording the value of church properties across the diocese for taxation purposes, which places an earlier religious foundation here beyond doubt. An older church stood on this hillock before the present one, but it was demolished to make way for the nineteenth-century building, according to the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by John O'Flanagan in the 1830s, a series of local historical notes gathered by surveyors as they mapped Ireland. That demolition erased whatever physical fabric remained of the medieval church, and no earlier headstones survive either. To the north-west, a tower house still stands in the landscape, a remnant of the same medieval settlement that once gave this upland spot its character as a place of some local consequence.