Inside the roofless ruin of the late-medieval church of Temple Athea, headstones rise from the ground just as they do in the wider yard outside, blurring any ordinary boundary between sacred interior and open graveyard. The church itself is a ruin, long exposed to the weather, yet it continues to function as a place of burial, its floor still receiving the inscribed stones of the local dead.

The graveyard is a substantial one, measuring roughly 66 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, enclosed by a stone wall that has been patched in places with concrete, the repair work of a later, more practical age. The earliest inscribed headstone recorded inside the church is dated 1796, though the church structure itself is considerably older, classed as late-medieval in origin. To the north of the church stands a 19th-century burial vault, a more formal and architecturally deliberate form of interment than the surrounding field graves. A second vault sits in a separate plot just outside the graveyard's eastern wall, technically beyond the enclosure but clearly part of the same funerary landscape. The site was compiled for the Archaeological Survey of Ireland by Denis Power, with aerial photographs taken in March 2006.

The graveyard is reached by a trackway on the western side of which the entrance gateway sits, positioned at the northeast corner of the enclosure. The same trackway leads on to a holy well located approximately 70 metres to the north, so a visit to one can easily take in the other. There is no elaborate infrastructure here; the gateway is a recent addition, and the wall, though repaired, is plainly functional rather than decorative. Those interested in the vaults should note that the second one lies outside the main enclosure wall to the east, easy to overlook if attention stays fixed on the church ruin at the centre of the yard.