The base it stands on is, in all likelihood, a remnant of the east wall of a medieval church, absorbed quietly into the later landscape of the dead. It is the kind of continuity that is easy to walk past without registering.

The graveyard sits on a slight rise of ground, south-east of a nearby tower house, and the church whose ruins it preserves was already old when it was recorded in the ecclesiastical taxation of 1302 to 1307, where a church at the "burgage of Milath" is mentioned, a reference that scholars believe may apply to this site at Two Mile Borris. A burgage was a plot of land in a medieval town or settlement held under a specific tenure common in the period of Anglo-Norman colonisation in Ireland, which gives a sense of the organised, if modest, settlement that once existed here. Of the church itself, very little remains above ground. One short section of wall runs east to west, its northern face worn down to exposed rubble and lime mortar. A possible wall face survives on the southern side, though it is heavily covered in ivy. That second fragment, running north to south, is what now props up the modern headstone. Also within the graveyard is a graveslab dating to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, a flat carved stone of the kind used to mark individual graves in the medieval period, and one of the more tangible traces of the site's earlier life. A new section of graveyard has since been added to the north, so the place remains in active use, the medieval and the modern occupying the same ground without much ceremony between them.