Templenafiacal translates roughly from the Irish as "church of the tooth," a designation that places this site in a small and curious category of early ecclesiastical monuments associated with relic veneration. Whether that tooth belonged to a saint, or was simply the name by which a founding figure was known, is the kind of question that tends to follow a place like this through the centuries, unanswered.

Aghagower, the parish in which the site sits, has deep early-Christian roots. It is associated with Saint Patrick, who is said to have founded a church there, and the area retains traces of that long monastic inheritance in its landscape and place names. The "temple" element of Templenafiacal indicates an early church or oratory, likely a simple structure of the kind that once marked holy ground across the west of Ireland, often sited near a well, a burial ground, or a routeway used by pilgrims. The Reek, Croagh Patrick, is not far to the west, and the whole stretch of country between Westport and Aghagower sits within what was once a well-travelled sacred landscape.

Because so little formal documentation has been published for this specific monument, it rewards the kind of visit where you arrive curious rather than briefed. Aghagower village itself retains a round tower stump and the remains of a medieval church, which gives some sense of the layered ecclesiastical history of the area. Templenafiacal, wherever precisely it falls within that landscape, belongs to the same long thread.