The site at Garrylaun sits with a commanding view in all directions over rolling grassland, the kind of elevated, exposed position that early medieval communities often chose for a church dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel, a saint whose cult was frequently associated with high places and liminal ground.

The medieval church bearing that dedication was demolished in the mid-eighteenth century, according to the historian William Carrigan, whose substantial history of the diocese of Ossory, published in 1905, remains a key source for ecclesiastical sites across Kilkenny. Around 1830, a Church of Ireland building replaced it on the same spot, continuing a pattern common across Ireland in which one tradition of worship quietly occupied the ground of an earlier one. The church is enclosed by a trapezoidal graveyard, an unusual shape that may reflect the boundaries of an older ecclesiastical enclosure. Within it, the ground holds a 16th-century graveslab and a late 17th-century headstone noted by Carrigan, along with a further graveslab dating to around 1660, recorded by Moore in the late nineteenth century. Graveslabs of this kind are flat, carved memorial stones, often bearing inscriptions or decorative motifs, and their survival across several centuries on a relatively obscure rural hilltop is quietly remarkable.