What began as a roughly triangular plot, around 75 metres east to west and tapering to a point at the eastern end, has grown in stages to swallow first the Catholic chapel that once stood immediately to its north, and then to extend further northward again. The ground itself, in other words, has been slowly consuming the buildings and boundaries around it.

By the time the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn in 1839, the western end of the graveyard already marked the site of a medieval church, recorded simply as "Site of Church", suggesting that the building had already vanished but that its memory, and the sanctity of the ground, persisted. That same year, the OS Letters described the place as "a large burying ground", and noted something more vivid: that patterns, or patron days, had been held there until roughly a dozen years before. These were communal gatherings tied to a saint's feast, combining religious observance with something closer to a fair or festival. At Church Hill they fell on the first Sunday in May and the Sunday before Michaelmas Day, the latter falling in late September. The fact that they had ceased by the 1820s places their ending in the period of wider suppression of such gatherings, which were often viewed with suspicion by church authorities on both sides of the Reformation divide. The combination of a vanished medieval church, a discontinued pattern, and a graveyard that kept quietly expanding gives this unremarkable-looking plot on Church Hill a layered, slightly melancholy quality that its current appearance would not immediately suggest.