The ground outside the Franciscan friary on the River Moy shows no trace of it at surface level, no mounded earth, no tilted stones, no legible inscriptions worn smooth by weather. Yet the dead are still present, just moved, or rather the evidence of them has migrated indoors, absorbed into the fabric of the friary church itself.

A survey from 1604 recorded the site as comprising one acre containing a church, a cemetery, and what were already described as ruinous buildings, suggesting that even four centuries ago the place was in decline. The friary had been founded as a house of the Franciscan Third Order Regular, a branch of the Franciscan family whose members lived in community under a rule but were not necessarily ordained clergy, and by the early seventeenth century the Reformation had left its mark. What became of the graveyard in the intervening years is not recorded, but the ground has kept its secrets. Inside the church, however, several graveslabs and memorials dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries survive. Beneath the bell tower there is a tomb dedicated to the Mangan family, accompanied by a broken graveslab dated 1857. In the chapel or transept, another slab, fragmented into two pieces, carries the inscriptions INRI and IHS, the latter an abbreviation of the Latin Iesus Hominum Salvator, meaning Jesus Saviour of Humanity, flanked by a carved cross and two carved heads.

Those carved heads are easy to miss if you are moving quickly through the ruins. The friary itself is among the better-preserved Franciscan houses in Connacht, and most visitors focus on the architecture. The graveslabs reward a slower look, particularly the transept fragment, where the carving is direct and unpolished in a way that feels less like formal ecclesiastical art and more like a local craftsman working from memory.