The south-western wall of Kilroe burial ground does not follow the straight line you might expect; it bends, tracing the arc of a ringfort, the type of circular earthwork enclosure widely used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended residence. The burial ground has grown around and over that earlier structure, and the result is a perimeter that cannot quite decide what shape it wants to be.

The Ordnance Survey maps tell the story of that gradual transformation. On the 1842 six-inch map, Kilroe is drawn as a roughly circular enclosure, its ringfort origins still legible in plan. By 1905 it is still circular but named plainly as a burial ground. By 1937, the enclosure had been extended and reshaped into something closer to a rectangle, measuring approximately 50 metres on its longer axis, though the southern and western arc of the original ringfort survived the expansion. The site was once associated with a parish church of Kilroe, said to have stood in the south-eastern corner, but writing in 1934, a researcher named Bowman noted that not a trace of the building remained. The earliest legible grave marker on site dates to 1823, and the burial ground continues to be used today. About 180 metres to the south lies a holy well, one of those small, often ancient water sources that frequently appear in close proximity to early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland. A lane of roughly 300 metres connects the burial ground to the road to the north-west, and it appears on both the 1905 and 1937 maps, suggesting it has served as the approach for well over a century.