Church Island is overgrown enough that it has effectively swallowed its own history, and that includes a cemetery whose precise boundaries nobody can now reliably trace. The graveyard is marked on Ordnance Survey maps, and local tradition has long held that the island was used as a burial ground, yet the vegetation has advanced to the point where the ground tells you very little.

The island also holds a small church on a north-facing slope, and writing in 1965, O'Connell noted that the cemetery's most likely extent was to the northwest of that church, where the terrain levels out somewhat. That observation was itself a matter of inference rather than clear evidence; even then, the site was too overgrown for any confident assessment. The combination of an island location, a ruined church, and a burial ground that has slipped out of legible view is not unusual in the Irish midlands, where early ecclesiastical settlements frequently occupied lake islands both for practical reasons of defence and for the sense of remove that island life could offer. What is quietly strange about Church Island is that the cemetery has become more of a tradition and a cartographic notation than a place anyone can actually stand in and recognise.