A graveyard in County Kildare that sits on the edge of the medieval Pale might sound unremarkable enough, but the ground at Kilteel carries an unusual density of history, layered so thickly that excavation work in the early 1980s found the ruined church at its centre had been built and rebuilt across more than a thousand years of continuous use. The enclosure itself is modest, a roughly rectangular area of around forty metres by thirty-five metres, bounded by a stone wall, and it sits in a minor valley where a small stream once ran to the north.

The site began as an early Christian monastic foundation known as Cell céli críst, meaning something close to "church of the servants of Christ". At some later point in the medieval period it passed into the hands of the Knights Hospitallers, a military-religious order who established a preceptory here, essentially a local administrative house of the order. Excavations carried out by Manning in 1982 and published in the same year revealed that the church ruins represent not one building but several successive phases of construction, from the Early Christian period through Romanesque work, into the high medieval centuries, and continuing into the seventeenth century. Running close to the south and west of the site is a section of the Pale Boundary, the earthwork and ditch system that once marked the limits of the area under firm English colonial control in medieval Ireland, making this quietly one of those places where frontier politics and monastic geography overlap. Manning also recorded the graveyard's burial markers in detail, identifying twenty-three headstones, a single recumbent stone, and an iron cross, with legible inscriptions spanning a remarkable stretch of time, from 1714 through to 1954.