Running just inside the post-1700 boundary wall is a curving earthen bank, subtly arcing inward to form what appears to be a circular enclosure around the church at the site's centre. Circular enclosures of this kind are associated with Early Christian ecclesiastical settlements in Ireland, where a roughly circular boundary, sometimes called a cashel or rath depending on its construction, defined the sacred precinct around a church or monastic cell. The geometry is telling: later graveyards tend to follow rectangular lines, and the curve here does not quite fit the surrounding wall it sits inside.

The place name itself carries weight. Relick, or relic, is one of those Irish townland names that preserves a memory of early religious significance, suggesting the presence of venerated remains or a site of early devotion long before any surviving structure was built. By the mid-seventeenth century the site was already ruinous. The terrier accompanying the Down Survey map of Piercetowne parish, compiled between 1654 and 1657, noted plainly that 'on Relicke stands the ruins of a church'. That survey, undertaken to facilitate the Cromwellian redistribution of Irish land, recorded the landscape in utilitarian terms, yet even in that context the church at Relick was worth naming. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1837, a rectangular church was still visible within a rectangular graveyard, suggesting that whatever rebuilding had occurred in the intervening centuries followed conventional post-medieval lines. A cross-slab also survives at the site, carved stone slabs bearing a simple incised cross being among the most durable traces of Early Christian religious practice in Ireland, though its precise dating is uncertain.

What remains today is a layered site: a modern graveyard with its relatively recent tombstones and post-1700 enclosing wall, a ruined church at its centre, and beneath and behind all of that, the faint arc of an earthen bank that hints at something considerably older occupying the same ground.