This is the watch house of Tisaxon Beg, a structure whose very purpose announces something unsettling about the era in which it was built. Watch houses, erected in graveyards across Ireland and Britain from the late eighteenth century onwards, were staffed by paid watchers whose job was to guard fresh graves against bodysnatchers. The trade in recently buried corpses for anatomical dissection was, for a period, brisk enough that families could not safely leave the newly dead unattended. A small building with a hearth, a door, and windows facing the burial ground was the practical solution.

The graveyard itself is a subrectangular enclosure, roughly 70 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, bounded by a stone wall on the west and south sides and a stone-faced earthen bank elsewhere. It remains in occasional use. The earliest inscribed headstone still legible dates to 1740, though the ground almost certainly holds older dead. Somewhere beneath or near the surface, the parish church of Tisaxon once stood, but it had already fallen to ruin by 1615, as recorded by Brunicardi in 1913, and no visible trace of it remains above ground today. The watch house itself, according to research by Henchion published in 1970, was erected somewhere between 1792 and 1842, placing its construction squarely within the period when the body-snatching trade was at its most active in Ireland and Britain. Its lintelled door opens in the south wall, with windows in the south and west walls giving a clear view across the graves, and the fireplace in the west wall would have made long night watches at least marginally bearable. By 1939, when the Ordnance Survey recorded it on their six-inch map, it was already named simply the Watch House, its function apparently still well remembered locally even as the need for it had long passed.