The enclosure around it, roughly 30 metres long and 20 metres broad, was defined by a fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, and an old stone wall. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorders passed through in the nineteenth century, the burial ground was largely abandoned, used only, as they noted, for the interment of children. The practice points to something common in Irish rural life: unbaptised infants and young children who died before receiving the sacraments were traditionally excluded from consecrated ground, and so were quietly laid in marginal places, often near old ruined churches, at parish boundaries, or beside water. These sites are sometimes called cillíní, and they carry a particular kind of historical sorrow.

The ruined church at the centre of the site was known locally as Tempaleen, a name suggesting a small church or chapel, and it sits within the Parish of Ratass, Diocese of Ardfert, in the Barony of Trughanacmy. The Ordnance Survey Name Books described the church walls as standing about three feet high, enclosing a space roughly twelve metres long and five and a half metres wide. By the 1841 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map, the building was already annotated as a church in ruins, with the sub-rectangular graveyard visible attached to its south-eastern end. The Kerry Field Club, who also examined the site, noted the presence of a well-defined grave site in the field where the church was reported to have stood. Lismore House lies approximately 230 metres to the south-east, giving some sense of the wider landscape these features sit within.

At the time of inspection, the church area was covered in overgrowth, the walls low and the enclosure boundaries weathered. The site occupies elevated ground in open pasture, with views extending from the south-east to the north-west, so the hill itself, though modest, would have made the spot conspicuous in the landscape, a detail that may have shaped its long use as a place set apart.