Mortlestown Graveyard in County Tipperary carries a note, held at Tipperary South Riding County Museum, describing graveslabs of seventeenth-century date within its bounds. When the site was actually inspected, no such slabs could be found. The graveyard was under lush growth at the time, but every visible headstone turned out to belong to the eighteenth century, not the seventeenth.

The most plausible explanation is a simple misidentification: the headstones dating from the 1700s were at some earlier point described as being a century older than they actually are. It is the kind of quiet error that accumulates in local records over generations, where a rough approximation hardens into received fact. The graveyard itself sits within a sub-circular enclosure and contains the remains of a medieval church, which gives the site genuine antiquity even if its carved stones are not quite as early as once claimed. Sub-circular enclosures of this kind are commonly associated with early ecclesiastical foundations in Ireland, often pre-dating the formal parish system introduced after the twelfth-century Norman arrival. The presence of such an enclosure at Mortlestown suggests the site has a long history of religious use, whatever the precise date of its surviving stonework.