The rectangular graveyard at Ballingarry, enclosed by a high wall and measuring roughly 48 metres north to south and 56 metres east to west, holds rows of 18th and 19th-century memorials, but the building that once occupied its centre has vanished entirely, leaving only that gentle swell of earth as a possible trace of a levelled structure beneath.

The site sits on a west-facing slope in upland Tipperary, with open views in most directions and a castle lying about 160 metres to the north-west. The layering of occupation here is considerable. A medieval church is believed to have stood on the site, and when a Church of Ireland church was constructed in the 19th century, it appears to have been placed on or very near that earlier foundation. This is the view John O'Donovan recorded in the Ordnance Survey letters, a remarkable series of antiquarian field notes compiled in the 1830s as surveyors mapped Ireland for the first time at six-inch scale. The 1843 edition of that survey marks the location plainly as "church on site of church", a quiet acknowledgement of the palimpsest beneath. No trace of the 19th-century building survives either. Earlier still, the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, which captured landholding as it stood around 1640 before the upheavals of the Cromwellian settlement, recorded that the glebeland, the plot of land attached to a parish church for the maintenance of its clergy, amounted to two acres on the east side of the church, fenced about with a ditch.