Look more carefully, though, and the landscape itself begins to tell a different story. The slight curve of the south-eastern graveyard wall and a peculiar kink in the road to the north of the village are not accidents of planning or piecemeal development. They are, according to archaeologists, the ghostly outline of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, an oval or circular boundary that once defined a sacred precinct, with an estimated maximum diameter of around 120 metres. These enclosures, typically associated with early Irish monastic or church settlements, were often defined by a raised earthen bank or wall, and their circular form has a habit of persisting in the landscape long after the original structures have vanished, preserved in field boundaries, roads, and graveyard walls that unconsciously follow the old line.

The site is reputedly associated with St. Broc, an early Christian saint, and was later attached to the church of Taney, according to Francis Elrington Ball's 1903 history of the area. The tradition holds that this was originally a convent site, though the precise details of its foundation and early history are lost. What survives in the middle of the graveyard is more tangible: a granite cross-base of probable Early Christian date, set against a fragment of wall. A cross-base is exactly what it sounds like, the socketed stone that once held an upright cross, and this one suggests that the site retained some form of Christian monument from its earliest period. By the sixteenth century, the graveyard had become the burying place of the Fitzwilliams, one of the prominent Anglo-Norman families of the Dublin area. The oldest legible tombstone surviving today marks the graves of Thomas Jordan and Catherine Hanon, dated 1629, as recorded by Parkinson in 1993.

The graveyard sits within Donnybrook Village, easily reached from the city, though its quiet interior can feel surprisingly removed from the surrounding streets. The granite cross-base is the most immediately rewarding thing to look for once inside, standing against the wall fragment roughly in the centre of the ground. The curvature of the south-eastern boundary wall is easier to appreciate from outside, or by consulting a map that overlays the modern street pattern against the theoretical enclosure shape. There is no grand monument to announce the site's age or significance, which is rather the point.