What makes it quietly anomalous is the layering: a modern stone wall runs along the perimeter, but it was built directly on top of a far older earth and stone bank, up to four metres wide and two metres high in places, most legible now in the south-east sector. The ground inside slopes noticeably from south-east up to north-west, and most of the gravestones cluster in the southern and south-western portion, the earliest among them dated 1720.

The site carries the Irish name Teampall Domhnaigh Mhóir, meaning the church of the great Sunday, a reference recorded by historian William Carrigan in 1905. He noted that Donaghmore functioned as a distinct parish until the Reformation, at which point it was united with Fertagh. Before that, it had been appropriated to Fertagh Priory, a medieval Augustinian house nearby. The church dedicated to St. Patrick, whose ruins stand in the northern part of the irregularly shaped graveyard, measuring roughly 95 metres north-west to south-east and 70 metres north to south, represents that long pre-Reformation history. Writing in the 1870s, a commentator named Moore recorded fragments of a medieval monument bearing curious incised ornamentation, pieces which may belong to a medieval graveslab still associated with the site. A graveslab of this kind would typically have carried carved decoration, sometimes a cross or interlace pattern, marking the burial of a person of some local significance. The fragments Moore saw hint at a monument that no longer survives intact, leaving only the description and a question about what, exactly, once marked this ground.