It carries the kind of spare, functional designation, Church, Trough, that suggests something genuinely old: a place named for what it was, in a landscape where such names have been accumulating since the early medieval period.

Clare is unusually dense with early ecclesiastical remains, many of them modest enclosures or ruined nave-and-chancel structures that once served small rural communities and have since been absorbed back into the farmland around them. A church in a townland called Trough, the name likely deriving from the Irish word for a territory or district, would fit a pattern common across the west of Ireland, where early Christian foundations, sometimes little more than a small oratory and a burial ground, were established to serve the pastoral needs of a tuath, a local kingdom or people. Without more detailed documentation it is not possible to say when this particular site was founded, by whom, or what physical remains survive above ground.