The site at Derrygrath occupies a natural rise in gently rolling County Tipperary farmland, its roughly rectangular outline measuring some 37 metres north to south and 77 metres east to west, with the church ruin positioned towards the western end.

The layering here is part of what makes the place worth pausing over. The church itself sits within a graveyard that holds headstones from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, the earliest dateable example going back to 1755 and found within the nave of the ruined building. That a headstone should end up inside the nave points to the way such sites evolve: once a church falls out of use, the enclosure around it continues to function as a burial ground, and the interior of the building gradually becomes just another section of consecrated ground. About 100 metres to the north lies a ringfort, a type of circular earthwork enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, which suggests that this particular rise in the landscape attracted settlement and use across a very long span of time. The graveyard is entered from the road to the southwest, through an iron gate or stile, and the surrounding bank and hedgerow give it a distinctly enclosed, self-contained quality.