It is probably neither. Scholars have noted that the shape of the burial ground, roughly 75 metres north to south and 63 metres east to west and enclosed by a post-1700 stone wall, may actually preserve the footprint of a military fortification thrown up during one of the most consequential sieges in Irish history.

The site had already accumulated considerable layers before the Williamite wars arrived. A medieval church dedicated to St Patrick stood here alongside a round tower, and both structures appear clearly on the Down Survey map of 1657. By 1776, however, they had been levelled entirely, leaving only the graveyard itself, as the antiquary Thomas Johnson Westropp noted in 1904 to 1905, somewhat mournfully: "The graveyard alone remains." What the Down Survey also captured was the presence of a Singland battery near the church during the sieges of 1690 to 1691, and the chronicles of those campaigns add considerably more detail. The military chaplain and writer George Story recorded that when the Williamite army returned in August 1691, the Jacobite defenders had refortified existing positions and had "built another some distance to the right, where formerly stood an old church," meaning St Patrick's, with a communication line begun but not yet finished connecting it to the other forts. On 25 August, Lieutenant General Mackay led an attack on Ireton's Fort and what Story called the "old Church-Fort," advancing across the fields under the support of foot regiments and cavalry, only to find the church fort deserted on their approach. The fort appears on the siege map Story published in 1693, but it drops out of the cartographic record entirely thereafter, surviving, if the interpretation holds, only as a ghost in the shape of the burial ground wall.

The graveyard is accessible through an entrance gate at the north-west corner of the enclosure. Cromwell's Fort, a related feature in this cluster of Civil War and Williamite-era military works, lies approximately 220 metres to the west. There is nothing dramatic to see at ground level; the medieval church and tower are entirely gone. What rewards a visit is the act of reading the space itself, standing inside those enclosing walls and considering that their geometry may owe less to a gravedigger's plan than to the defensive calculations of a garrison preparing for a Williamite assault in the summer of 1691.