It is the kind of recycling that speaks to how communities have long treated old sacred buildings, not as monuments to be preserved at a distance, but as a ready quarry of dressed stone when the occasion demanded.

The site sits on the brow of a gentle south-facing slope, with open views across the surrounding countryside, though the ground rises to the west and closes that horizon off. At the northern boundary of the rectangular graveyard, measuring roughly 53 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south, stands the ruin of a medieval church, oriented in the conventional east-west alignment. Tucked into the north-west angle where the church meets the enclosing stone wall is a round tower, the kind of tall, slender early medieval structure, typically Irish in character, that served as bell tower, landmark, and place of refuge. The combination of church ruin and round tower within the same walled enclosure points to a site of some early ecclesiastical significance, and the graveyard has continued in use across the centuries, accumulating headstones and table-tombs from the 18th century through to the 20th. In more recent decades, the burial ground has expanded southward into a large rectangular extension, occupying an area of roughly 57 by 63 metres between the old graveyard and the public road, so the site now reads in two distinct phases when you look at it carefully.