But at Ballinskelligs Abbey on the western shore of the Iveragh Peninsula, the burial ground also contains four notched gravemarkers, a type of medieval funerary object that remains, in the words of a 2012 survey, relatively unknown and little studied. These rough, notched stones sit alongside 230 named headstones, ten house-shaped or tiered strong-box tombs clustered around the cloister, and architectural fragments salvaged from the abbey buildings themselves, several of which now serve as grave markers inside the nave. The abbey complex effectively divides the graveyard into two areas, and the northern section slopes noticeably toward the sea, the ground bumpy and irregular underfoot.

The abbey was founded in 1210, or shortly afterwards, as a priory of the Arroasian Canons, a reformed branch of the Augustinian order that spread across Ireland from the twelfth century. Its origins reach back further still: before the mid-eleventh century, the monastic community of Skellig Michael, the vertiginous early Christian site on a rock eight miles out in the Atlantic, had already transferred to this mainland location due to the hazardous conditions on the island. The priory retained formal possession of the Great Skellig and kept the Latin designation de Rupe Michaelis, meaning of the rock of Michael. The buildings visible today contain architectural detail spanning the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, though the site has been shrinking steadily. Charles Smith noted coastal erosion here as early as 1756, and the destruction of the south-eastern corner of the complex has been ongoing since at least that date. A substantial concrete sea-wall now forms the entire eastern boundary, and sections of earlier, collapsed sea-wall can still be seen on the rocky shore below.

The entrance is through a pair of locally forged wrought-iron gates set between rubblestone piers, though only the southern gate opens, and even then only partially. A stepped stile in the north-eastern boundary wall serves walkers coming along the beach from Ballinskelligs village or from the nearby castle. A holed-stone recorded on the beach outside the abbey by Crawford in 1915 has since disappeared entirely, and the font remains noted in earlier surveys were not located during the 2012 survey either. What you can still find inside the church is a fragment of a sandstone rotary quern-stone and a font fragment, as well as two simple cross-inscribed slabs, one of them post-medieval with the initials J C carved around the shaft of the cross.