Settled into a slight depression on a west-facing slope, the enclosure is defined by a stone-faced earthen bank, a boundary that measures roughly 100 metres northwest to southeast and 80 metres northeast to southwest, giving it a broadly subrectangular outline. Just to the south, the headwaters of a small stream begin their northeast-to-southwest course, lending the place a particular stillness that comes from being tucked into a natural crease in the ground rather than set prominently on open terrain.

The church here stands on the footprint of an older structure known locally as Kilsthorne, a name that preserves some trace of the site's earlier ecclesiastical identity. Early Irish church names beginning with "Kil" derive from the Irish word "cill", meaning a cell or church, and their survival in local usage often signals a foundation considerably older than any standing fabric. The present building replaced that earlier church, but the graveyard enclosure around it retains the shape and boundary of the older site. In the 1940s, cut stone was recorded within the graveyard, fragments that point to worked masonry from an earlier phase of construction, though the precise origin or character of those stones was not fully documented at the time.