That fragment is all that survives of a structure once known locally as the Fire House, and the traditions attached to it are considerably older and stranger than anything the surrounding 18th-century headstones might suggest.

A plan of the graveyard drawn in 1743, recorded by Caulfield in 1882, shows the Fire House as a small rectangular structure with an east-west axis, and a pathway running directly through it. Caulfield noted that it had long been called the Fire House and was said to be the remains of a pagan structure. Coleman, writing in 1910, recorded a separate tradition that the relics of St Colman, the 6th-century bishop from whom Cloyne takes its identity, had been preserved there until the building was nearly razed and the relics removed in the 18th century. A further tradition connects the structure with a sacred fire, of the kind maintained by the nuns of St Brigid at Kildare, where a perpetual flame was kept alight as an act of devotion. Whether any of these traditions reflect genuine continuity of use, or are later attempts to make sense of an already mysterious ruin, is impossible to say. The graveyard itself was subject to a degree of 18th-century tidying: an order of 1721 directed that the churchyard be levelled and a new row of trees planted, and the 1743 plan shows two lines of trees running around the boundary. Elsewhere among the graves, a headstone dated 1726 is carved with the Instruments of the Passion, the objects associated with Christ's crucifixion, in a style closely related to a plaque found at Corkbeg, suggesting a shared hand or workshop tradition in the region. The collection of 18th-century headstones runs from at least 1706, and a number of low, uninscribed gravemarkers also survive, their occupants now entirely anonymous.