Crossroads burials and crossroads parishes were once a feature of Irish rural life, rooted in older territorial logic, and something of that layered significance clings to this large, irregularly shaped enclosure, which stretches roughly 66 metres north to south and 76 metres east to west, sitting at the base of a north-facing slope with the old church placed close to its southern boundary rather than at its centre.

The site answers to the name Killgrant in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, one of the great seventeenth-century attempts to map and value Irish land following the Cromwellian conquest. That survey records a church here along with three acres of glebeland, the land attached to a parish church for the support of its clergy, with one and a half of those acres lying to the east of the building, fenced off by a ditch. By the time the oldest legible headstone was carved, in 1732, the congregation leaving its mark in stone was already burying its dead beside a structure of considerably earlier origin. The majority of the visible memorials date from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, their inscriptions mapping the ordinary continuities of rural Tipperary life across those generations. Immediately north of the chancel, the eastern arm of the old church where the altar once stood, an overgrown vault sits largely unexamined, its occupants and date unrecorded in any visible inscription, quietly accumulating ivy and quiet.