That contemporaneity is the quietly unusual detail here: not a graveyard that accumulated over centuries, but a burial ground that seems to reflect a single community or moment, laid out deliberately around a church and, most significantly, around a shrine.

Excavation of the enclosure revealed three distinct burial methods used side by side. Simple dug graves were the most basic form, just a body-shaped cut in the earth. Lintel graves were covered with flat stones laid horizontally across the top, like a low roof over the dead. Slab-lined cists went further, enclosing the body within upright stone slabs on the sides as well, forming a stone box. The greatest concentration of burials was found to the south of the church, precisely where the shrine was also located. A shrine in this context would likely have held relics, a physical focus of veneration that drew the faithful and, in death, the buried. The association between that sacred object and the clustering of graves to its south suggests the dead were positioned deliberately in relation to it, proximity to the shrine carrying obvious spiritual weight. The work was carried out over several seasons and is documented extensively in a series of reports by Sheehan spanning the 1990s and early 2000s.