The local people had no name for it. They had no memory of it ever serving as a churchyard. As far as anyone could recall, only one person had ever been buried there: a Mr Ryan of the nearby Kilferagh House, whose grave stood alone inside what was otherwise, in the words of one observer writing in 1905, a smooth, unbroken surface.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in the third volume of his history of the Diocese of Ossory in 1905, noted the foundations of a structure within the enclosure and interpreted them as the remains of a church. More recent thinking suggests the feature is more likely a landscape element than an ecclesiastical ruin. What the enclosure itself represents is harder to say with certainty. Its oval form is a shape commonly associated with early Irish ecclesiastical or settlement sites, where a curving boundary bank or wall, known as a cashel or enclosure, would have defined a sacred or domestic precinct. The private Ryan burial in the nineteenth century was essentially an afterthought, a single family grave inserted into something far older that the surrounding community had long since stopped reading as a place of the dead.

The enclosure lies within the grounds of Kilfera House, about four hundred and sixty metres to the southwest of that building. Its quiet anonymity in Carrigan's time, already ancient and unnamed by those who farmed around it, gives the site an unusual character: a place whose function was forgotten so completely that it was reinvented on a very small scale, for a very short time, before falling silent again.