A fireplace in a graveyard building is unusual enough to pause over. The structure, labelled "Watch House" on a 1939 Ordnance Survey map, was not a gatehouse or a store but almost certainly a shelter for those employed to guard fresh graves against body-snatchers, a genuine occupational hazard in rural Ireland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With a lintelled door in its south wall, windows in both the south and west walls, and that telling fireplace, it was clearly built for people to spend long, cold nights inside.

The watch house was erected sometime between 1792 and 1842, according to the local historian Henchion, writing in 1970. The graveyard itself is a subrectangular enclosure of roughly 70 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, bounded by a stone wall on the west and south sides and by a stone-faced earthen bank elsewhere. It remains in occasional use, and its earliest legible inscribed headstone dates to 1740. Underneath and around it, however, lies a much older absence. The parish church of Tisaxon once stood here, but by 1615, as noted by Brunicardi in 1913, it was already a ruin, and today there is no visible surface trace of it at all. The church has dissolved entirely into the ground it once served.