The graveyard itself is enclosed on three sides by an earthen bank roughly two metres wide and up to two metres high, a form that often indicates a much earlier ecclesiastical boundary, yet at ground level no masonry or foundation from any previous church is visible. What makes the site quietly puzzling is not what survives but what was apparently consumed to build what does.

Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, noted that the ruins of a local Carmelite abbey were used as building material for the original church on this site. The Carmelites were a mendicant order whose Irish houses often served surrounding communities, and it is possible that the abbey ruins had functioned as the medieval parish church before falling into disuse. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, conducted a visitation of his diocese, the church at Horetown was a going concern: the rector was one Richard Henrican, the curate Robert Dreighan, and both the church and its chancel were recorded as being in repair. The graveyard enclosure, set on a gentle east-facing slope with a small stream running just to the south, fits the pattern of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where elevated ground near water was a preferred location. Archaeological monitoring carried out in 2011 during the digging of a sewer trench to the west, south, and south-east of the nineteenth-century church found no material remains, which deepens rather than resolves the question of what, precisely, stood here before the present building absorbed its predecessor's stone.