The Ordnance Survey mapped a different building as that church, and for well over a century that designation went largely unquestioned. But when the western section of this burial ground was examined more closely, the accumulated detail began to complicate the official picture.

When the OS six-inch map was first published in 1838, the burial ground was already named and depicted as a roughly square, tree-lined enclosure measuring around 57 metres by 55 metres. By 1932, its eastern half had been substantially extended, bringing the overall dimensions to approximately 95 metres by 86 metres. The enclosing mortared stone wall and the eastern gateway visible today belong to this expanded form. Most of the headstones and graveslabs date to the 19th and 20th centuries, but the older western section has a different character altogether. When the site was inspected in October 1984, numerous small uninscribed set stones were recorded there alongside two crudely cut stone crosses. These uninscribed markers are the kind of modest, pre-modern burial indicators found at early Christian and medieval sites across Ireland, where formal inscribed monuments were either unavailable or not the local custom. In 2019, Elizabeth FitzPatrick identified wall-footings of a possible building within this same western area and proposed that these remains, rather than the structure the OS maps had designated, could represent the actual site of the medieval church of Kilcloony. The question remains open, and the ground holds more than the headstones suggest.