The word "temple" in Irish place names typically signals a church or ecclesiastical site, yet in this case nobody is entirely certain that a church ever stood here at all. The structure is gone. The enclosure that contained it is largely gone. What remains is essentially a name and a cluster of competing spellings, each one a small clue that something significant may once have occupied this hilltop.

The antiquarian Thomas Westropp, writing between 1900 and 1902, recorded the building under the name Templeharaghan and found it already entirely demolished, having stood within a fort that was itself nearly levelled by his time. The site attracted a different spelling again from a later researcher: Swinfen, writing in 1992, called it Temple Harigan, and noted something considerably more intriguing. A place recorded as Templeharraghan, also known by the alias Killargreayn, appears in the 1195 charter of Clare Abbey and in papal letters. Clare Abbey, an Augustinian foundation established in the twelfth century not far away in Ennis, was an institution of some regional importance, and a reference in its founding charter would place this hilltop site, whatever its nature, within the earliest documentary record of organised ecclesiastical life in the area. Whether the alias Killargreayn points to a separate tradition or simply an alternative name for the same ground is not resolved. The nearest surviving church, at Drumcliff, lies roughly 700 metres to the south-west, which hints at a broader landscape of early Christian activity in this part of Clare.