The church stands on the site of an earlier structure known as the Church of the Trinity, and the ground around it, roughly rectangular and measuring approximately 44 metres north to south and 70 metres east to west, has been receiving the dead for centuries. The oldest legible headstone visible within the enclosure dates to 1729, though the site's religious life runs considerably deeper than that.

By 1839, when Ordnance Survey investigators were gathering local testimony for their Letters, residents recalled a Patron, or pattern day, held here each Trinity Sunday. A pattern was a devotional gathering tied to a saint's feast or a sacred calendar date, combining prayer at a holy site with communal activity, and the Ballycannon pattern had apparently lapsed only around twenty years before that account was recorded. What makes the site quietly unusual is how much of that older ceremonial culture persisted even after the pattern itself faded. Writing in 1969, O'Kelly noted that during pattern week the graves were still being trimmed and decorated with flowers, and that the week closed with platform dancing at the nearby crossroads. Platform dancing, performed on a raised wooden surface set out in the open air, was a rural Irish tradition that survived in pockets long after it had disappeared from most of the country.

The graveyard was still in active use as recently as 1987, set within reclaimed grassland with open views along the valley in most directions. The Church of Ireland building itself is no longer in use, a shell of a building whose denomination tells only part of the story of a place that belonged, in living memory and perhaps longer, to a much older calendar.