By 1839, when Ordnance Survey field officers passed through and noted "several small stones and some appearances of old graves", they were also told that no one had been interred there for eighty years, and that the only exceptions had been unbaptised children. That last detail carries some weight. In pre-Famine Ireland, children who died before baptism were often excluded from consecrated ground, and so old, disused enclosures like this one became the quiet repositories for those the Church could not formally receive. The place had its own category of grief.

The site goes by the name Religpatrick, a form that combines the Irish word "reilig" (burial ground or graveyard) with the name of the saint, placing it in association with St Patrick and, notably, with a holy well dedicated to him that lies roughly three hundred metres to the east. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a modest rectangular area, named "Religpatrick Old Grave Yard"; by the time the 1904 and 1935 editions appeared, the designation had shifted to "Religpatrick Grave Yard (Disused)", the enclosure itself appearing somewhat larger in outline, perhaps reflecting how the earthwork had spread or how surveyors were reading it. A 1934 account by Bowman described the shape as circular, with a diameter of twenty-two yards, and noted that no burials had taken place for two hundred years at that point, which would place the last known interments around the early eighteenth century. The uninscribed stones still visible on the surface offer no names and no dates, only the faint grammar of graves.

The ground sits on a north-facing slope, in what is now ordinary farmland pasture. The enclosing rise is subtle enough that a visitor walking across the field might not immediately register it as intentional, though once noticed it becomes legible as a boundary that someone once thought worth maintaining.