When the Ordnance Survey first mapped it in 1839, the ground surrounding the medieval church of Kilmademoge was marked with a dashed line, the conventional sign for a boundary that existed in name or custom but not in stone or mortar. The place was open to the landscape around it, defined more by habit and local understanding than by any physical enclosure.

The OS Letters of 1839 describe it simply as a small burying ground lying to the south of the church, which itself occupied the northern edge of an oval area measuring roughly thirty metres north to south and thirty-five east to west. That informality did not last indefinitely. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, noted that the graveyard had been walled in some years earlier by the Kilkenny Board of Guardians, the local poor law authority whose responsibilities in the nineteenth century extended well beyond the workhouse to include the maintenance of burial grounds. The walling also brought an expansion of the site; the enclosed area grew to approximately thirty-two metres by forty-three, and the medieval church, once sitting at the northern edge of an unenclosed oval, found itself shifted to just north of centre within the newly bounded space. The shape of the enclosure remained sub-oval, a form that often reflects very old land boundaries, possibly predating the medieval church itself.