A hood-moulding is a projecting stone drip-course running above an opening to shed rainwater, a common detail in medieval ecclesiastical work, and its survival here suggests the east end retained some structural protection longer than the rest. Two graveslabs lie inside the walls, quiet and largely unattributed.

What gives the site its particular quality of loss is the question of what once surrounded it. Nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps recorded a burial ground around the church, suggesting a community gathered here over generations to bury its dead. That ground has since vanished, and the two slabs inside the ruin may be all that physically remains of it, displaced or simply left where they lay when the site fell out of use. Some 130 metres to the north-east stands the remains of a castle, a pairing of ecclesiastical and defensive structures that was far from unusual in medieval Connacht, where local lords and parish churches often occupied adjacent ground within the same landscape. The proximity hints at a settlement of some local consequence, even if the historical record of Derrymaclaughna itself is thin.