The parish of Lempitlaw, which was at one time a separate parish, was joined with that of Sprouston at an unknown date. The church is now gone, though indents in the ground within the graveyard show its original location. The last vestiges of the church appear to have disappeared by 1845, but it is recorded that shortly before this some ruins were still to be seen. At that time, the parish of Spouston was the property of the Duke of Roxburgh, but the barony of Lempitlaw was the property of the Duke of Buccleuch. A coped, tegulated grave cover survives in the churchyard near the site of the church.

Lempitlaw is not mentioned in the Inquisitio of the diocese of Glasgow, undertaken sometime between 1115 and 1124, but it was granted, with all its teinds, to the hospital at Soutra between 1221 and 1238 by Richard Germyne. In 1460, along with Soutra, the church was united with Trinity College in Edinburgh. In 1463, Lempitlaw and several other places were made into a free barony in favour of David Scott of Kirkurd.

The 1956 RCAHMS inventory reference to Lempitlaw mentions the coped grave cover, but Laing (1975) says that in 1969 he and J. Ritchie excavated it. Laing's paper considers this type of grave cover a late type of Hogback monument and suggests an early 12thc date for the one at Lempitlaw. There are others of this type in Scotland, as in the nearby one at Ancrum and as far away as the Northern Isles (as for example at Skaill, Orkney). A particularly close comparison may be made with the missing, but photographed, grave cover from Kirknewton (Midlothian, Scotland). Within Northern England there are several as well, including those now in storage at Durham Cathedral. Laing has not considered the possibility that this type of grave cover might equally have evolved from tiled Romanesque grave covers, as at Fordwich (Kent). His suggestion that this specific type occurs primarily in the late-11thc and/or early-12thc is entirely plausable.