It was not the only one. Numerous architectural fragments, including decorated stone from the medieval church, ended up repurposed among the burial plots, giving the graveyard an odd, layered quality where the building and the ground around it have gradually exchanged materials. One pre-Romanesque element survives in an even more functional role: a trabeate lintel, that is, a flat horizontal stone spanning an opening, with a plain-relief architrave, has been incorporated into a stile. Tomás Ó Carragáin, writing in 2010, noted that this lintel is definitively from an early church rather than from the ruined round tower nearby, but that otherwise almost nothing of the original early fabric remains in place.

The hill itself was known long before any monastery arrived. Westropp, writing in 1922, recorded its earlier name as Tulach na Feinne, the Hill of the Fianna, linking it to the legendary warrior band of Irish mythology. At some later point the site was reputedly founded as a monastery by St. Patrick, and the hill took the name Ardpatrick accordingly. By the medieval period there was a stone church here, a round tower immediately to its north-west, and a holy well dedicated to St. Patrick roughly fifteen metres to the south-south-west. A round tower, typically a tall, tapering stone structure associated with early Irish monasteries and used variously for refuge, storage, and bell-ringing, now survives only as a ruin. Aerial photographs taken in July 1967 by the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography show the church and graveyard sitting within a much larger hilltop enclosure, likely the remains of the original ecclesiastical boundary of the monastery. The same photographs reveal extensive rectangular field systems across the hill, adding yet another layer to the site's occupation.

The graveyard itself measures roughly 48 metres north to south and 56 metres east to west, enclosed by a stone wall built after 1700, with a later extension to the east. Visitors who look carefully at the gravemarkers will find that some of the stones are not what they first appear; the carved or moulded surfaces of reused church fragments are worth examining up close. The stile incorporating the pre-Romanesque lintel is another detail easy to pass without registering its age. St. Patrick's Well lies a short distance to the south-south-west of the church ruin and is worth locating separately. The hill setting means the surrounding landscape is visible in most directions, and the traces of the old field enclosures become easier to read from a slight elevation.