The burial ground had belonged to a church or chapel connected to the monastic Grange of Kilree, and it had lain quietly beneath the surface until nineteenth-century construction work brought it back to light. It is the kind of discovery that gets noted, then largely forgotten, leaving a place that carries its history underground rather than on any visible surface.

The detail comes from the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, who recorded that Kilree castle, traditionally remembered as having belonged to the Friars, stood within a few perches of a Mr. Whitecroft's house, with a fragment of it still standing at the time. A grange, in the monastic context, was a farm or estate managed by a religious house, and Kilree's grange appears to have had its own small chapel with an associated burial ground. The field beside the castle remnant and the house carried the Irish name Gorhee na soggarth, meaning the Priest's Field, which suggests local memory held onto the site's religious character long after the structures themselves had gone. The house in question is most likely Kilree House, built somewhere between 1839 and 1847 and situated around seventy metres south-west of the castle remains. If that identification is correct, the graveyard lies in the area immediately surrounding the house, and at least part of it now sits beneath the building itself.