What makes Templepatrick unusual is what lies beneath and around it, largely unnoticed: a series of low earthen banks encircling the burial ground on all sides, some of which may have nothing to do with the dead at all. When the site was examined in 1980, it measured roughly 48 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, its sub-rectangular shape still legible in the landscape, and still visible from aerial photography as a tree-planted enclosure gone quiet with disuse.

The graveyard holds 18th and 19th-century headstones, most of them clustered to the south of the ruined church at its centre. But the low banks that ring the whole enclosure complicate any simple reading of the place. Some are consistent with the kind of field boundaries and enclosures that accumulated around rural burial grounds in the 1700s and 1800s. Others, however, read as something older. The Down Survey, a remarkable mid-17th-century mapping project carried out between 1657 and 1659 on behalf of the Cromwellian administration, recorded a clustered settlement at Templepatrick on its parish map. The Down Survey was the first large-scale systematic land survey of Ireland, produced to facilitate the redistribution of confiscated Catholic-owned land. The earthworks at Templepatrick may be the faint physical remains of that settlement, compressed into the margins of a later graveyard, their original function long since erased by enclosure and agricultural improvement. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its 25-inch map in 1913, the site was already annotated simply as a grave yard, with no hint of the layered occupation that the banks around it might represent.