The modern building sits within a rectangular graveyard enclosed by a stone-faced bank, measuring roughly 60 metres along its northwest to southeast axis and 48 metres across. That kind of boundary, a low earthen or rubble bank faced with stone, is a recurring feature at early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where it would have defined the sacred precinct. Here, though, the bank is the only structural hint that anything preceded the present building.

The Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable series of nineteenth-century field reports compiled by scholars working alongside the OS mapping teams, contain a note suggesting that an earlier religious foundation once occupied this spot. The reference appears in the volume edited by Michael O'Flanagan, published in 1928, which drew on correspondence gathered during the original survey. That tantalising detail aside, no early stonework, no carved fragments, no architectural remnants from a previous church survive above ground. Whatever came before has either been absorbed into the fabric of the later building, cleared away, or simply vanished over time. The slope itself, angled steeply towards the west, would have made this a visually prominent position in the landscape, the kind of elevated, directional site that early Christian communities in Ireland often favoured.