That elevation is not incidental. It is one of several details that, taken together, point to something considerably older lying beneath the present arrangement of headstones and church walls.

The parish here is Templeneiry, a name that itself gestures toward ecclesiastical origins, and the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 records the glebeland, that is, the land attached to a church for the support of its clergy, as lying near the church and "fenced about with a ditch." The Ara River runs to the north of the site, and researchers have noted that it would have served as a natural boundary on that side, functioning much as a man-made enclosure would. Early Christian church settlements in Ireland were typically organised in concentric zones, with an inner sanctum for the church itself and an outer enclosure for associated lands and structures. The raised graveyard area at Bansha may represent that inner zone, while the glebeland to its north, bounded by the river, may correspond to an outer enclosure. Supporting this reading are two Early Christian graveslabs found reused among the existing headstones, one on the north side of the graveyard and one on the south. Early Christian graveslabs of this kind are simple inscribed or decorated stone markers, often predating the more elaborate commemorative traditions of the medieval and post-medieval periods, and their presence here as reused fragments suggests they were already old when whoever placed them there did so. When the antiquarian John O'Donovan visited in the 1840s, he also noted a seventeenth-century Butler graveslab at the east end of the church, a reminder that the powerful Butler dynasty, long prominent in Tipperary, had connections to this place well into the early modern period.