When Ordnance Survey officers visited Garrincreen in 1839, they recorded plainly that there was no burying ground at this west-facing Kilkenny hillside. Yet people had been laid to rest here, and the physical evidence of that fact was quietly dissolving into the landscape around them.

The site sits on a gentle slope above a stream some 180 metres to the west, within a roughly rectangular enclosure measuring approximately 15.5 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south. A ruined church, orientated broadly east to west as early Christian churches typically were, occupies the southern portion of the enclosure. Writing in 1905, the local historian Carrigan observed that although interments had taken place within living memory, no monuments remained visible, and the place had shed every outward sign of being a graveyard. What had survived was part of a substantial earthen rampart that once enclosed the church and its burial ground. By 1969, O'Kelly described the whole enclosure as a rath-like quadrangle of roughly a quarter of an acre with a surrounding fosse, a fosse being a defensive or boundary ditch. The comparison to a rath, a type of circular or near-circular earthen ringfort common across early medieval Ireland, is telling: the enclosing earthwork at Garrincreen had outlasted the community's memory of what it was actually for, becoming legible only as something older and more familiar.

What lingers alongside the archaeology is the tradition of a Mass Path leading from the church grounds to a bridge about 170 metres to the north-west. Mass Paths were informal routes, often centuries old, used by Catholic communities to reach places of worship during periods when public Catholic practice was restricted or simply inconvenient. That this one is still remembered at Garrincreen, even as the graves themselves disappeared without monument or marker, suggests the site held a place in local memory long after the ground stopped giving any obvious reason for it.