It left no enclosing wall, no gate, no memorial to its own disappearance; its boundaries were defined only by a ring of old whitethorn bushes and a slight rise in the ground just over the stream dividing the townlands of Dunbell and Holdenstown. By the time anyone thought to record it properly, it was already gone, lost to land reclamation sometime in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The site appears on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1839 as an unenclosed sub-rectangular area, roughly 24 metres north to south and around 27 metres east to west at its widest point. By the later revision of 1899 to 1902, its outline had shifted to a triangular shape of slightly different proportions, suggesting either that the ground itself had changed or that earlier surveyors had approximated. Writing in 1966, a local historian named Dan Byran placed it precisely: on a small elevation opposite the avenue running from near Prospect House out toward the fields of Holdenstown, unfenced and ringed by large, aged whitethorns. Whitethorn, or hawthorn, has long been associated in Ireland with boundary-marking and with places considered sacred or liminal, and its presence here may be more than incidental. The deeper history of the spot reaches back further still. The Reverend William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded that Dunbell had been held by Jerpoint Abbey, the Cistercian monastery a few miles to the south near Thomastown, until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century, after which it became a civil parish. A monastic grange, which is to say a farming estate managed by the abbey, would typically have included a chapel for the use of those working the land. Byran reasoned that just such a chapel may once have stood at the Holdenstown graveyard, giving it an ecclesiastical origin that would explain why people were buried there at all.