What makes this one in County Westmeath stranger still is what surrounds it. The walled ground sits on elevated pasture with wide views in every direction, and what those views take in are the ghostly traces of a vanished town, the remains of its defensive wall still visible to the south-east and west, and a motte and bailey castle just 160 metres to the east.

Ardnurcher was a medieval borough, a formally constituted settlement with trading rights, clustered in the fields to the south and west of the church. It was defended by a town wall, fragments of which survive, and anchored by the motte and bailey, a form of early Norman fortification in which a raised earthen mound, the motte, was paired with an enclosed courtyard, the bailey. The settlement is gone, but its footprint remains legible in the landscape around the graveyard. Inside the enclosure itself, the ruins of the medieval church of Ardnurcher occupy the southern quadrant, while a structure built against the inner face of the eastern wall has been identified as possibly a post-medieval burial enclosure. The graveyard wall is post-medieval stone, roughly 105 metres on its longer axis, entered through a gate at the north-east. Memorials within date from the eighteenth century onwards, and the site remains in occasional use.

The disused Church of Ireland building in the south-west quadrant adds another layer. Nineteenth-century in date and now roofless, it sits alongside the much older medieval fabric in a way that quietly compresses several centuries of religious and civic life into a single field on a hill. The surrounding landscape, once a borough with walls and a castle, now gives little outward sign of what it was.