The eastern shoreline of Lough Derg lies just 70 metres to the west, a river runs to the north, and the remains of Castletown castle stand a mere 90 metres beyond that. The graveyard itself is substantial, roughly 55 metres north to south and 70 metres east to west, enclosed by a nineteenth-century stone wall with an entrance gate at the north-east. Within it, a restored church sits noticeably off-centre, which gives the whole enclosure a slightly unresolved quality, as though the original planners had something else in mind.

The site carries a long documentary trail. A survey carried out between 1654 and 1656, part of the Down Survey programme that mapped landownership across Ireland in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars, noted one acre of glebeland, that is, church-owned land, lying to the west of the churchyard, described as "finced round wth a ditch and at present wast." That same survey showed a medieval mill standing to the east of the graveyard, and a second castle site, recorded on the 1840 Ordnance Survey map, lay 220 metres to the south-south-east. In the seventeenth century, the Royal Book of Visitation recorded that a Daniel Kennedy was the officiating vicar and that the church was at that time in good repair, a detail that places the site firmly within the administrative and religious life of the period rather than on its margins.

The headstones are worth looking at carefully. Many are cut from slate and carry examples of folk art, the kind of carved ornament, compasses, hourglasses, angels, and interlaced borders, that local craftsmen developed outside any formal artistic tradition. This variety of carving rarely survives in good condition, and slate, being more durable than sandstone, has preserved details here that would long since have weathered away elsewhere.