By 1966, the writer Dan Byran could describe the Holdenstown graveyard as a quiet, unfenced plot on a slight rise, just over the stream that separates Dunbell from Holdenstown, roughly opposite an avenue running out from near Prospect House. Within a few years it was widely assumed to have vanished during land reclamation, and in 1959 there had even been a formal application to demolish the mound submitted to the Land Project Office of the Department of Agriculture. Yet satellite imagery examined in 2021 suggests that the mound, and the ground immediately around it, was never actually levelled. It persists, apparently, beneath the crops.

The deeper history of the site connects it to Jerpoint Abbey, the Cistercian house a few miles to the south-west. The historian William Carrigan noted in 1905 that the townland of Dunbell had been Jerpoint's property until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century, after which it passed into use as a civil parish. Monastic granges, the farming estates that religious houses relied on for much of their income, typically included a chapel to serve the workers and lay brothers attached to them, and Byran suggested that Holdenstown's graveyard site may represent exactly that kind of modest dependent chapel. Adding weight to the idea, aerial photography has since revealed a curvilinear enclosure around the mound, visible only as a cropmark, the faint outline left in growing grain when buried features alter how the soil retains moisture. Curvilinear enclosures of this kind are a recognised feature of early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, often marking the original boundary of a sacred precinct.