Local tradition, recorded by P. J. Hartnett in 1939, holds that this was once the graveyard of Matehy parish, and that the community stopped burying their dead here after a soldier who had previously murdered a priest was interred among them. The contamination was understood as moral rather than physical, and the ground was simply left. Whatever the full history behind that decision, the site gradually disappeared into the landscape, and what had been a functioning burial ground became, over generations, an overgrown enclosure with almost nothing left to see.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the place with some care, marking a roughly oval enclosure, approximately 80 metres on its longest axis, with a ruinous rectangular structure at its centre identified as the site of a church. By the time later OS editions were published, in 1904 and 1937, only the church site was still being noted, and the graveyard designation had quietly disappeared from the cartographic record. The triangular field that surrounded the enclosure on the 1937 map has since been swallowed by plantation, and today the most visible surface feature of the whole complex is a low earthen mound at the centre, roughly 10 metres by 7 metres, oriented east to west in the manner typical of early Irish churches. A single standing stone, about 0.7 metres high and 0.6 metres wide, is the only above-ground trace that the surrounding ground was ever used for burial at all. The graves themselves have left no mark that can be seen.