Cloheen Graveyard in Ballynahinch, County Limerick, is one of those places where the evidence for a medieval building amounts to little more than a subtle unevenness in the ground. In the northern quadrant of the burial ground, a slight rise in the earth is the only physical suggestion that a church once stood on this spot. Everything else has gone, absorbed back into the landscape over centuries, leaving a graveyard that continues to hold the dead without any obvious explanation for why it exists where it does.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1904 to 1905, recorded what was then known about Cloheen. He noted the presence of a holy well nearby, called Tober Gobnait, or Deborah's Well, and documented that a pattern, a traditional Irish gathering held on a saint's feast day with prayers, socialising, and sometimes circumambulation of the site, took place there on the 3rd of August. Westropp also raised the possibility that the lost Doonmoon Church had stood within this very graveyard, though no definitive evidence confirmed it. The connection to Gobnait, a saint associated with beekeeping and healing, gives the site a specific devotional character, even if the well and the pattern observance have largely faded from active use.

The graveyard sits in the townland of Cloheen, and a visitor arriving today would find a quiet burial ground with no standing masonry and nothing that immediately announces its potential antiquity. The most useful thing to look for is that low rise of ground in the northern part of the enclosure, which archaeologists have identified as a possible indicator of a subsurface church foundation. Aerial photographs taken in January and May of 2003 were used in the assessment of the site, suggesting that crop or soil marks may be more legible from above than at ground level. Anyone with an interest in early medieval ecclesiastical sites will want to approach this one with patience and a certain comfort with ambiguity.