The place is classified as a deserted medieval settlement, a category that covers the ghost outlines of communities that were once living, working, and trading, and which now survive mainly as earthwork traces, soil marks, or fragmentary stonework in the landscape.

Jerpoint Abbey, founded in the twelfth century and suppressed during the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, drew around it the kind of ancillary settlement that monastic houses typically generated. Tradespeople, labourers, pilgrims, and those seeking the economic shelter of ecclesiastical patronage would have gathered in its shadow. The settlement at Jerpointchurch is understood to be associated with this monastic complex, and its desertion likely followed the fortunes of the abbey itself. When the monastery lost its institutional role and its lands passed into secular hands, the community that had depended on it had little reason to remain. This pattern repeated itself across Ireland and Britain in the post-dissolution period, leaving whole neighbourhoods to dissolve quietly back into farmland.