Two sandstone corbels, architectural fragments salvaged from the old church that once stood here, have been repurposed as grave-markers, standing at modest heights among the headstones near the east gable. A corbel is a projecting block built into a wall to support a beam or arch above it; seeing one pressed into service as a memorial is an odd small reminder of how materials outlast the buildings they came from. The graveyard is still in use, with headstones spanning from 1763 and 1764 at the oldest end, to 2009 in the north-east corner.

The site sits on a hill whose summit curves to the south, and roughly 120 metres across the road to the west, another hill carries the earthworks of a motte and bailey, the raised mound and enclosed courtyard associated with early Norman fortification. The two landmarks facing each other across the road suggest this corner of Tipperary was once a good deal more strategically significant than it appears today. The church known in medieval records as Donhekly or Dunhogyl was listed in the Papal Taxations of 1291 and 1302, placing it firmly within the administrative machinery of the medieval Church. By 1615, according to the historian Seymour writing in 1916, both the church and its chancel were described as being in repair and thatched with straw, which gives a vivid sense of a working rural parish at that moment. The graveyard itself appears to have begun as an earthen scarp, a cut or edge roughly a metre high, before a stone wall was built along it; the original scarp is still clearly visible along the south and west sides, and the first Ordnance Survey map of 1840 shows its full circuit.

Buried in the north-west sector of the graveyard is Daniel Breen, who lived from 1894 to 1969. Breen became one of the most recognisable figures of the War of Independence, and he subsequently fought on the Anti-Treaty side during the Civil War. The graveyard entrance, reached through steps built into the old scarp on the west wall, leads directly into this layered place, where medieval parish life, early modern repair work, recycled stonework, and twentieth-century political history have all quietly accumulated.