It is the kind of place that appears on maps and in monument registers without much accompanying explanation, a name that gestures at a history of local worship, community gathering, and very possibly penal-era devotion, without yet giving up the details.

The prefix "old" in a placename like this often signals a site that pre-dates the network of Catholic parish churches built across Ireland in the nineteenth century, many of them constructed after Catholic Emancipation in 1829 made permanent church buildings legally and socially viable. Before that, Mass was frequently celebrated outdoors or in modest, unadorned structures, sometimes little more than four walls without a roof, positioned in townlands that have since lost much of their population to emigration and clearance. Gortbaun, like many rural Mayo townlands, carries that weight of depopulation. Whether this chapel served a pre-Emancipation congregation, or belongs to an earlier medieval tradition of local devotional sites, remains, for now, an open question.