The one at Haroldstown in County Carlow does something different: it holds almost perfectly to a square, roughly 37 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west, enclosed within a granite dry-stone wall five courses high, its corners rounded rather than sharp. That deliberate geometry gives the place an unusual quality, a sense that the ground was measured and bounded with some care before anyone was laid in it.

At the interior, slightly north of centre, the footprint of a simple rectangular church survives at foundation level, its axis oriented east to west in the customary manner. Immediately to the south-east of those foundations stands a cross-inscribed pillar, the kind of early carved stone that turns up occasionally in old ecclesiastical enclosures and suggests activity here well before the medieval period. A fragment of moulded granite jamb, likely from a doorway, also remains within the enclosure. The graveyard does not sit in isolation. It lies adjacent to the remains of a castle and, close by, the traces of what may have been an abbey, a cluster of features that points to Haroldstown once carrying considerably more weight in the local landscape than it does today. The 20th-century headstones that occupy the northern and south-eastern portions of the ground, several of them topped with pseudo-Celtic crosses, show that the site continued in use into living memory; the most recent burial identified here dates to 2002.

The raised interior of the graveyard is worth attention when visiting, as the elevation above the surrounding enclosure can itself be a sign of long and layered use, accumulated over generations of burial. The granite wall, dry-built and carefully coursed, is a quiet piece of craft in its own right.