It is an oddly domestic fate for a seventeenth-century memorial, but it is not the strangest detail attached to this place. The church that stands here today was built in the 1820s on the footprint of an earlier one that had, by the time of its replacement, sunk nearly three feet below the surrounding ground level. Whatever it was, it was old enough that no one in the nineteenth century could say precisely when it had been built.

The parish of Magheracloone takes its dedication from St Molua of Kyle, a sixth-century saint from Co. Laois whose descent was traced to the Coirce Oiche of Ulster. A twelfth-century hagiographical life connects him only briefly with nearby Drumsnat, yet his feast day on 4 August was marked here at Magheracloone, suggesting a more local cult than his Laois origins might imply. The church appears in the ecclesiastical taxation of Pope Nicholas IV, compiled between 1302 and 1306, as de Cluayn. By 1540, at the Suppression of the monasteries, the tithes had been appropriated to the Crutched Friars of St John the Baptist's in Ardee; the Crutched Friars were an order of mendicant religious who took their name from the cross they wore or carried. Eighty years later, those same tithes were in the hands of the Moore family of Mellifont, and in 1622 the church was recorded as having been repaired on the outside. In the graveyard, three seventeenth-century headstones survive in the form of a latin cross, a regional type found occasionally across Ulster. Two bear legible dates: one of 1685 for Thomas MacNamorue, and one of 1687 for Owen MacMahon and his wife Rose Kelly. A third, for Patrick Mahen, was recorded with the date 1688, though that inscription is now worn beyond reading.

Archaeological testing carried out outside the graveyard boundary found a ditch or fosse running parallel to the graveyard wall to the south-east, and what may be the same feature to the north-east. Together they could indicate the outline of an earlier ecclesiastical enclosure, a type of boundary commonly associated with early medieval church sites in Ireland. No dateable artefacts came from the trenches, though iron slag turned up across much of the tested area. The graveyard itself is D-shaped in plan, roughly 75 metres by 60 metres, with the most regular wall running to the north-west, and the church sitting in its south-eastern quadrant.