The burial ground is not simply a parish churchyard; it occupies the inner western sector of a bivallate ecclesiastical enclosure, meaning a monastic precinct defined by two concentric banks or ditches, a form typical of early medieval Irish monasteries. That enclosure is still traceable on the ground, and the graveyard's roughly sub-rectangular shape, approximately 34 metres northeast to southwest and 33 metres northwest to southeast, reflects the disciplined geometry of the original monastic layout rather than anything more recent.

The layering of history here is particularly compressed. By the time the Ordnance Survey Letters were compiled in 1839, the medieval church of the parish of Kilmacahill had already vanished entirely, demolished to provide building material for a Protestant church erected in its place. The OS Letters record the loss plainly: no part of the old church remains, it having been pulled down to build the modern little Protestant church. That replacement building was itself subsequently demolished, noted by O'Brien in 1955, leaving the graveyard without any standing ecclesiastical structure at all. Three phases of religious building, each erasing or consuming the last, reduced to an open burial ground within the ghost of an early medieval monastery.