The roughly rectangular plot, running about fifty metres north to south and forty metres east to west, with a narrow finger of ground extending westward, sits on the south side of a road and is still occasionally used for burial. Its earliest legible headstones date from the late eighteenth century, but the ground itself is considerably older, thought to lie within the bounds of an early ecclesiastical enclosure.

The first church recorded here was already in ruins by 1615, and by 1702 a visitor described it as a roofless ruin of no use, a phrase that suggests not neglect so much as a formal ecclesiastical acknowledgement that the building had passed beyond recovery. That ancient parish church of Inishkenny was eventually replaced in 1809 by a Church of Ireland building on the same site, named St. John's Church on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps. The topographer Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, described it as a small plain edifice with a low tower and spire, which is about as modest an architectural assessment as the period allows. That building, too, has since crumbled back into the hillside; what survives is a rectangular shell, roughly fifteen metres east to west and ten metres north to south, with sections of the north, east, and west walls still standing to about a metre in height, heavily overgrown and easy to miss.