At the edge of Oldconnell House and its outbuildings in County Kildare, a graveyard sits noticeably higher than the ground immediately surrounding it, a quiet signal that what lies beneath and around it is older than the headstones suggest. The interior ground level has been raised by centuries of burials and accumulated earth, and somewhere within it the foundation walls of a ruined church survive, a low stone outline of a building that once gave the site its reason for existing.

The graveyard itself is a roughly trapezoidal enclosure, approximately 55 metres east to west and 48 metres north to south, bounded on its western and northern sides by a roughly coursed stone wall standing about one and a half metres high. An earthen bank runs along the inside of the northern boundary, adding a second layer of enclosure that hints at a longer history of demarcating this space. The southern side is open, with a path running along it. Modern buildings now form the eastern boundary. Table tombs, slabs, and headstones record burials from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, layered over what is clearly a much earlier ecclesiastical site. Abutting the graveyard at its south-western corner is a small separate enclosure with a stone wall, an entrance gate, and a cross at the south; its interior appears to be entirely featureless, its original purpose now unclear. About a hundred metres to the south-west, a fine motte is visible, a motte being the raised earthen mound at the centre of a Norman fortification. Its proximity to the church and graveyard is a reminder that this corner of Kildare was once a more consequential place, where military and ecclesiastical structures occupied the same tight landscape within sight of one another.