Templeanard, which combines the Irish word for church, "teampall", with "ard", meaning height or promontory, suggests an early ecclesiastical presence on elevated ground, the kind of sparse, wind-exposed location that early Christian communities in Ireland often chose deliberately, both for spiritual remove and for the practical advantage of a commanding view over water.

The Kilcredaun area has long been associated with early medieval religious activity. The broader parish name itself is thought to derive from Cill Chreodáin, the church of a saint named Creodán, pointing to a local monastic or devotional tradition that predates the Norman period. Sites named with the "teampall" prefix in Clare and across the west of Ireland frequently mark the ruins of early medieval churches or the memory of structures long since reduced to earthworks or a scatter of dressed stone. In many cases, the holy ground was reused across centuries, with patterns of local veneration outlasting the physical buildings themselves. What precisely stood at Templeanard, when it was built, and by whom, remains unrecorded in any currently available source.