The burial ground at Baltinglass tells a different story. Despite sitting alongside the ruins of an abbey founded in the twelfth century, the graveyard contains, by one account, no slabs or tombs of any real antiquity at all.

The abbey itself was a Cistercian foundation, and the graveyard occupies a rectangular plot of roughly 85 metres east to west and 42 metres north to south, lying at the northern edge of Baltinglass town, about a hundred metres from the River Slaney. Writing between 1906 and 1908, a commentator named Fitzgerald observed that the earliest dated slab in the entire burial ground is inscribed 1699, and that it lies near the sedilia at the east end of the abbey ruins. A sedilia is a set of recessed stone seats built into the wall of a church chancel, used by officiating clergy during the Mass, and its survival alongside the ruins gives some sense of what remains of the original structure. What it does not explain is why a graveyard beside an abbey of such age should have so little to show before the late seventeenth century. Whether earlier markers were removed, destroyed, or simply never replaced in durable stone is not recorded. The gap between the abbey's medieval origins and that solitary 1699 slab quietly raises more questions than it answers.