At Grove in County Kilkenny, the Ordnance Survey's first six-inch map, produced that year, marks the burial ground with a dashed line rather than a solid one, suggesting that the roughly square plot, measuring around 53 metres by 56 metres and widening slightly towards the south-west, had no wall to speak of at the time. By the 1947 revision, an enclosure had been added to roughly the same footprint, but the shape and scale remained. The graveyard is entered through the south end of the east wall from the public road, and the remains of a medieval church, oriented east to west as was standard practice, occupy the northern portion of the site.

When Ordnance Survey officers passed through in 1839 and recorded their observations in what are now known as the OS Letters, local people were clear about what this place was called: Roilig a Tulacháin, meaning the Burying Ground of the Tulachan. The original Irish name suggests a long association with the site that predates any documentary record. The graveyard was described at the time as large and much frequented, which points to it still being in active use well into the nineteenth century. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan noted the presence of a coffin-shaped slab positioned adjacent to the entrance to the church, a type of medieval grave marker carved to echo the outline of the body it commemorates. He also recorded what appears to be a chest tomb, a box-shaped raised monument common in Irish medieval burial practice, though only a fragment of a graveslab near the graveyard entrance may now represent what survives of it.