The graveyard at Holdenstown was described in 1966 by Dan Byran as quite small and unfenced, occupying a little elevation just over the watercourse that marks the boundary between Dunbell and Holdenstown, roughly opposite the avenue running out from near Prospect House into the fields. It was thought to have disappeared during land reclamation, and in 1959 a formal application was made to the Land Project Office of the Department of Agriculture to demolish the mound. Yet satellite imagery examined in 2021 suggests that the mound, and the ground immediately around it, was never actually levelled.

The site carries a deeper history than the graveyard alone might suggest. According to the historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, Dunbell had been under the ownership of Jerpoint Abbey, the Cistercian monastery near Thomastown, until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century swept away such holdings and left Dunbell reconstituted as a civil parish. Byran, working from this, argued that the area would have functioned as a monastic grange, meaning an outlying farm managed by the monks to supply the abbey, and that such a grange would almost certainly have had its own chapel. The slight elevation above the stream at Holdenstown, with its ring of whitethorns, is the most likely candidate for where that chapel stood. Adding weight to this interpretation, aerial photography has revealed a curvilinear enclosure in the surrounding fields as a cropmark, the kind of circular or oval boundary, often visible only from above when soil conditions differ over buried features, that frequently indicates an early ecclesiastical site beneath the plough soil.