There are no walls, no railings, no clear boundary where the burial ground ends and the surrounding land begins. The dead, in a sense, simply spread outward.

The site sits within a roughly oval ecclesiastical enclosure, a type of boundary that in early Irish Christianity typically marked out sacred ground around a church, often pre-dating the Norman period and sometimes following much older territorial lines. The oval or sub-circular form is generally considered a marker of early medieval foundation, when such enclosures served spiritual, legal, and social functions simultaneously. The church of Kilcashel stands at the centre of this arrangement, ringed by graves that observe no formal edge. The name Kilcashel, like many Irish placenames beginning with "Kil" (from the Irish "cill", meaning church or monastic cell), suggests an early ecclesiastical origin, though the precise history of this particular foundation is not fully documented.

What makes Barnadown quietly arresting is that combination: an ancient enclosure whose outer form has survived, containing a church whose graves have refused to stay contained. The slope and the oval and the unmarked burials together give the site the quality of a place that has never quite been finished, or never quite been formalised, existing instead in the looser arrangement of an earlier way of marking sacred space.