That annual ritual, recorded in the 1880s, points to something older layered beneath the present arrangement of stones and walls: this was not always a Protestant place, and the church that now stands in ruins was not the first to occupy the ground.

According to the Kilkenny historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, the original Catholic parish church here, dedicated to St David, Bishop, whose feast falls on the first of March, was demolished more than two centuries before his time, with a Protestant church raised in its place at the same point. By 1839, that replacement was described in the Ordnance Survey Letters as a modern Protestant church with its own burial ground. A note from 1906 adds a further detail: a human figure carved in stone, located to the south of the church, possibly the remnant of an effigial tomb, the kind of carved grave marker, usually depicting the deceased in relief, that was associated with medieval or early post-medieval commemoration. The graveyard itself is roughly rectangular, running about 45 metres on its longer axis, enclosed by a stone wall, with the public road bending around its north-western and south-western sides.

What gives the site its particular character, though, is the pattern of observance that Hogan recorded in the early 1880s. On the eve of the patron, which fell on the first Sunday of March, people came to clear weeds and grass from the graves, layering them with fresh clay and whatever field flowers were available so early in the year, flaggers among them. The feast day itself was spent in prayer at the graves of relatives and in pilgrimages around the graveyard. It is a form of communal care for the dead, tied to a saint's day, that continued in this place long after the building above ground had changed hands entirely.