The church is called Teampall na Ratha, the church of the rath, and the rath in question, a ringfort, the remains of a circular earthen enclosure typical of early medieval Ireland, sits just thirty metres to the north. The two monuments share a hilltop with lower ground falling away on both sides, and together they suggest a site that was in use, in one form or another, for well over a thousand years.

By the time the first six-inch Ordnance Survey map was produced in 1839, the graveyard boundary was marked only with a dashed line, indicating that the stone wall visible today had not yet been built. What existed before it was an earthen bank, and substantial remnants of that earlier enclosure were still traceable when a field inspection was carried out in 1987. A section two metres wide continues westward from the line of the southern wall for fourteen metres, then turns northward for roughly fifty-three metres; a corresponding bank runs twenty-one metres beyond the northern wall. The rectangular graveyard sits inside what was once a much larger earthen precinct. Writing in the 1870s, Moore noted two fragments of a baptismal font among the graves. Carrigan, writing in 1905, added inscribed monuments, a graveslab, and something harder to categorise: a leacht, a monumental heap of loose stones, which he described as substantial. A leacht is a type of votive or commemorative stone cairn associated with early Irish ecclesiastical sites, though as Carrigan noted, tradition was silent as to its origin. By the 1987 inspection, the font fragments, the graveslab, and the inscribed monuments were all obscured beneath heavy vegetation, and the site remained largely overgrown.