That is not a metaphor. By 1905, the graveyard that had stood on the south side of the Church of Bawnaghra had been cleared and put to agricultural use, the remains of those buried there left undisturbed only in the sense that nothing marked them any longer. Today there are no visible surface remains at all, which places this site in a peculiar category: historically documented, archaeologically recorded, and yet entirely invisible to anyone standing in the field.

The detail comes from Canon William Carrigan, whose 1905 history of the diocese of Ossory described the wider site with some precision. He recorded the church of Bawnaghra, known in Irish as Kyle-aghra, as standing at the centre of a ten-acre "Church field" that had once been a single undivided enclosure. Around that enclosure ran a triple rampart of earth with a double fosse, a fosse being a defensive or boundary ditch, which suggests the site was once a significant ecclesiastical enclosure of the kind commonly seen in early Irish Christianity. By Carrigan's time the land had already been divided into smaller plots, the unified enclosure broken up. The graveyard to the south had fared worse still: destroyed, with corn crops growing over it. A short distance from the church he also noted a well called Thubberachoppel, meaning the horse's well, distinguished pointedly from a holy well, the kind of site that attracted religious veneration. This one, apparently, did not.