No headstones break the surface, no mounds suggest where the dead lie. The burial ground exists, effectively, as a buried fact, interred almost as thoroughly as the people within it.

The site sits on a broad gravel ridge that drops steeply to the river floodplain on its eastern and southern sides, with a gentler slope down to the Nore on the west. Writing in 1905, the Kilkenny historian Canon Carrigan recorded that a church known as Thomple-Glhozheen once stood here, roughly 146 metres north of a later church and about 73 metres from the Dinin. It was built on a raised limestone bed, elevated some sixteen to twenty feet above the adjacent river, and its east-west orientation and considerable dimensions suggested a structure of some ambition and age. By Carrigan's time, the walls had sunk to barely a foot above the surface, though he noted that a modest excavation would be sufficient to expose the full foundations. The local tradition attached to the place was striking: people described it as "the second church named in Rome," a phrase Carrigan understood as one reserved exclusively for the oldest Christian foundations in Ireland, implying an early medieval or even earlier origin. The surrounding churchyard had fallen out of use by around 1770, and whatever grave markers may once have stood there had long since disappeared. What persisted, at least into the early twentieth century, was a Good Friday custom of gathering at the site to pray and walk in pilgrimage, a pattern of devotion often associated with pre-Norman sacred sites in Ireland, where the landscape itself holds the memory that the built structure no longer can.