The ground here, low-lying and marshy in the Ferrybank townland, had given up its dead in a manner both literal and unsettling: skeletal remains lay exposed in a sandbank, interred in what appear to have been long cists, a form of burial in which the body is enclosed in a stone-lined grave covered with flat capstones. The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marked the spot plainly as "Site of Grave Yard", though even that modest label understated what might once have stood there.

The story behind the burials reaches back to the very early thirteenth century. Before 1204, a Norman lord named Theobald Walter granted what was then described as the island of Arklow to the Cistercian monks of Furness Abbey in Lancashire, for the foundation of a new monastery. The Cistercians were a reform-minded monastic order known for establishing houses on marginal, often waterlogged land, so the low marshy ground at Ferrybank would not have been out of character. The arrangement was short-lived, however. By 1205, Walter had transferred the community to a new foundation at Abington in County Limerick, leaving whatever provisional church or settlement the monks had managed to establish effectively abandoned. The antiquary Eugene O'Curry later described the graveyard in vivid terms: graves covered with large flags, sides built with stones of various sizes, and bones still scattered across the surface. He also noted a substantial trapezoidal tombstone, possibly of medieval date, measuring six feet long, two feet broad at one end and narrowing to one foot eight inches at the other, which had been removed to Shelton Abbey, the seat of the Earls of Wicklow. The combination of that tombstone, the cist burials, the sandbank location, and the early documentary reference to an island foundation has led scholars including O'Curry and M.V. Ronan to identify this graveyard as the likely remains of that fleeting Cistercian presence. The site is now covered by housing, the graves long since disturbed, and the tombstone itself separated from any legible context.