The early medieval church that once stood in the south-west corner of this small, square enclosure has left no trace above ground, yet the site retains its name and its layers: a later medieval church stands about 85 metres to the west, a holy well dedicated to St Scoheen sits roughly 60 metres beyond that, and a cross-inscribed slab, the kind of simply decorated stone common to early Irish Christian sites, was discovered in 1950 lying along the bank of the graveyard. The 1900 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks it plainly as "Tiscoffin Church (Site of)", an unusually candid admission of absence for a cartographic record.

The name Tiscoffin comes from the Irish Tigh Scoithin, meaning the house of Scoithin, and it refers to St Scoithin, a sixth-century monk who established a hermitage here during the early Christian period in Ireland, when such solitary or small community foundations were being set up across the country. The ridge setting, overlooking a steep river valley to the east and north, fits the pattern of early hermit sites, which often sought elevated or marginal ground. Local tradition, recorded by Carrigan in 1905, adds a more singular layer to the place: the enclosure is said to have been the burial ground of seven bishops who were septuplet brothers. It is the kind of claim that oral history carries across centuries without necessarily softening, and it gives the quiet graveyard a strangely specific gravity.