A low hillock beside the National Stud of Ireland is not the most obvious place to find a murder recorded in a medieval court roll, a sheela-na-gig, and gravestones fashioned from window frames salvaged off a ruined church. Yet that is exactly the layered strangeness of the old graveyard at Tully, where centuries of reuse and repurposing have left a site that rewards careful looking.

The church at the centre of the graveyard belonged to the Preceptory of the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, a military-religious order that managed hospitals and estates across medieval Europe. Their Tully house stood here, and the church ruins still occupy the highest point within the enclosure. In 1298 the site appeared in the Justiciary Rolls of Ireland in connection with a homicide committed within the cemetery itself. The record names Roger de Galewey, described as provost of Toli, and notes that the felon responsible was removed from the church and placed in the stocks in the house of the Master, a detail that suggests the Hospitallers exercised their own jurisdiction over the precinct. The graveyard continued in use long after the medieval period, and several post-medieval grave markers survive, though a number of burials are simply marked by chamfered window jambs taken from the church ruins and reused as headstones. The practice of recycling dressed stonework in this way is not unusual in Irish graveyards, but it gives Tully an oddly self-cannibalising quality, the church slowly redistributed among the graves surrounding it. Numerous burials have also been recorded within the church walls themselves. More recently, a sheela-na-gig was identified in the western quadrant of the graveyard. A sheela-na-gig is a carved stone figure, typically female and explicitly carved, found on churches and other structures across medieval Ireland and Britain; their precise function remains debated, but their presence at ecclesiastical sites is well attested.

The enclosure is roughly sub-rectangular, approximately 67 metres north to south and 52 metres east to west, and is bounded by a nineteenth-century stone wall. Entry is through a gate in the centre of the west wall, which retains a stone stile and a coffin stand, the latter a flat-topped stone platform used to rest a coffin during burial processions. St Bridget's Well lies about 140 metres to the south-south-east, and Tully House sits roughly 160 metres to the east, placing the graveyard in a cluster of historically significant features that together map out the older, quieter landscape behind the stud farm's famous thoroughbreds.