The name Kilfian suggests ecclesiastical origins, the first element deriving from the Irish cill, meaning a church or early monastic cell, yet no structural evidence of such a building survives. What remains instead is a layered burial ground set in undulating grassland, sloping gently southward toward the Rathroe River, with rising ground to the west. Scattered through the oldest section are rows of low, rough stones, barely clearing the turf, uninscribed and irregular in shape. Set against the more formal graveslabs and kerbed plots, they read as a much older or more modest tradition of commemoration, anonymous and unreadable.

The graveyard appears by name on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, depicted at that point as a polygonal enclosure of roughly 30 metres by 40 metres, reached by a north-south road entering at the northwest corner. By the time the 1923 edition was produced, it had already been extended northward, roughly doubling in length to a more rectangular form, and a further extension followed in the latter half of the twentieth century. The oldest portion, in the south of the present-day site, sits on slightly elevated ground and is enclosed on three sides by a mortared stone wall with a concrete cap. A graveslab dated 1762 carries the earliest legible inscription, though the informal unmarked stones suggest the ground was in use well before that. In the eastern half of this older section there is a cross-slab, a single carved stone that may hint at the site's early Christian associations without explaining them. The original access route, long since grassed over, is still traceable as a faint path along the western edge of the twentieth-century extension.