The Forbes family burial vault, constructed as part of an earlier church on the same site, has been quietly receiving the dead since the late seventeenth century, its existence folded into successive layers of rebuilding and time.

The first Earl of Granard, who died in 1696, is credited in his family's own records with having "built from the foundation the Church of Newtown Forbes," with the explicit intention that he and his descendants would be interred in the vault beneath it. The church he raised was no modest affair. A description from 1682 by Nicholas Dowdall characterises it as "a fair and Large Church Sumptuously adorned," suggesting that even before its formal completion around 1694, as noted by the topographer Samuel Lewis writing in 1837, the building was already well advanced and evidently impressive by local standards. What stands today on the south-western edge of Newtown Forbes is a nineteenth-century successor, and it appears the earlier structure was not simply demolished but absorbed into the later fabric, leaving the Forbes vault intact beneath it. To the south of the church, within the western half of the surrounding graveyard, a seventeenth-century headstone survives, one of the few above-ground traces of that earlier layer of occupation on this site.