Rather than being stored or discarded, these architectural pieces were quietly repurposed as memorials, giving the graveyard an unusual layered quality where the fabric of the church has, in a sense, folded back into the ground around it. The boundary of the graveyard is similarly absorbed into its surroundings; the southern wall is formed in part by the rear boundaries of town house plots, meaning the edge between a working market town and its medieval burial ground was never a clean or ceremonial one.

The church was dedicated to St. Andrew the Apostle, whose feast day falls on the 30th of November, and it sits within what was the medieval deanery of Kilmallock, in the diocese of Limerick and the barony of Coshlea. The name Kilfinnane derives from Cill Fhíonáin, meaning the church of Fíonán, and by the time of the Down Survey of 1654 to 1656, the site was already described in terms of walls rather than a functioning building; the survey's terrier noted that the parish had the convenience of a market at Kilfinane, along with a good castle and the walls of a church. That castle, Kilfinnane Castle, still stands to the west of the graveyard. A rebuilding of the church is recorded in 1760, described by Lewis in 1837 as a large plain edifice, suggesting at least one later phase of use on what is clearly a multi-period site. The celebrated ninth-century Kilfinnane brooch, a fine example of early medieval metalwork, may have been found somewhere in this immediate area, though scholars including Ó Floinn have noted the possibility that it surfaced instead at the site of St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church, about seventy metres to the north-west.

The graveyard is a substantial polygonal enclosure, roughly 49 metres north to south and 62 metres east to west. An entrance that once opened directly onto Main Street from the south has been blocked up; access is now through an iron gateway in the northern end of the western wall, off Castle Lane, as shown on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map of 1897. The reused medieval stonework used as grave-markers is visible once you move south of the church ruins, and is worth looking at closely for any surviving carved detail.