The area measures roughly fifteen metres east to west and ten metres north to south, and it came to wider attention only in the 1970s, when an attempt to reclaim it for agricultural use disturbed evidence of human burials. The ground has been left alone ever since.

The site belongs to a longer story about a lost place of worship. The Down Survey, a remarkable mid-seventeenth-century mapping project carried out between 1656 and 1658 that aimed to document landownership across Ireland in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars, includes a terrier, meaning a written commentary accompanying the parish map of Tacumshin, that refers to an old chapel at Ballytory. A few decades later, around 1680, a writer named Synnott recorded a chapel at Ballytory dedicated to All Saints. Between those two references the picture is consistent: a chapel existed here, it was already described as old by the time of the Down Survey, and a burial ground lay beside or around it. No trace of the chapel structure appears to survive above ground today, but the patch of undisturbed earth that locals have long called the graveyard suggests that the community of the dead outlasted the building that once served them.