A working graveyard sitting on the footprint of a medieval military-religious house is unusual enough, but what makes the site at Killybegs Demesne quietly arresting is the layering involved. The stone wall that encloses this roughly trapezoidal plot, running about sixty metres north to south and fifty-five metres east to west, appears to follow the line of a much older ecclesiastical enclosure, meaning the boundary itself may be older than anyone buried within it. The gate at the southern end brings a visitor into a space where burials cluster to the south and west of the church, with a smaller scattering to the north and east, and where the ground is still occasionally broken for new interments.

The site was once occupied by a house of the Knights Hospitaller, the medieval religious order founded in the twelfth century to care for pilgrims in the Holy Land and later a significant military force in its own right. The Hospitallers held properties across Ireland during the medieval period, and their preceptories, as their local houses were known, typically combined a chapel, residential buildings, and agricultural land. At Killybegs, the church that stands within the enclosure is the most visible survival of that earlier complex. The stone wall and its trapezoidal outline suggest that the organisation of the space has deep roots, possibly pre-dating even the Hospitallers themselves, with the ecclesiastical enclosure it traces being an earlier sacred boundary that later occupants simply inherited and maintained.