Creevagh, from the Irish "craobhach" meaning branchy or wooded, hints at a landscape that predates the formal parkland laid out around Westport House. The presence of a burial ground inside demesne walls is not entirely unusual in Ireland, where ancient or early Christian graveyards were sometimes absorbed into later private estates as the land changed hands and was remodelled over centuries. What makes such sites quietly compelling is that the graveyard, whatever its age and use, continued to hold its dead even as the world around it was redesigned for the tastes of Georgian and later proprietors.

Westport Demesne itself is associated with the Browne family, later the Marquesses of Sligo, who developed the estate from the late seventeenth century onwards. The town of Westport is notably one of the few planned towns in Ireland, laid out in the eighteenth century with the Carrowbeg River running through its mall, and the demesne forms the western backdrop to this designed landscape. A graveyard named Creevagh within those grounds suggests a site of earlier occupation or community use, possibly pre-dating the formal demesne boundary, though the precise origins and history of this particular burial ground remain to be fully documented.