The graveyard at Magowry measures only about fifteen metres east to west and just over eight metres north to south, yet the walls that enclose it are not modern constructions. They are, in part, the surviving fabric of a medieval church, incorporated directly into the boundary, standing between 0.8 and 1.35 metres high. The effect is unusual: the dead are buried within walls that were themselves built for the dead's benefit centuries earlier.

The history of the site is one of gradual contraction and then disappearance. When the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced in 1840, the church was shown with only a small semi-circular area to its south defining the graveyard, and a scholar named O'Flanagan, writing in 1930, noted that there was no enclosing graveyard around the church at all at that date. By the time the second edition map appeared in 1906, the graveyard had expanded considerably into a D-shaped area some 54 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south, its extent marked by a slight rise in the surrounding pasture. That rise is still visible. The present, much smaller enclosure is largely a burial ground for the Clancy family, with headstones running from the 1860s through to 2002, and a twentieth-century calvary, a sculptural grouping depicting the crucifixion scene, positioned near the south end of the east wall. The wider picture is grimmer: local accounts hold that when the fields around the current graveyard were ploughed at some point in the past, skeletal remains and gravestones were turned up by the blade. The full extent of burial at this site, in other words, lies well beyond what is now enclosed and tended.