It is the kind of place that appears on maps and in surveys without much elaboration, which itself says something about how many such sites survive across the Irish countryside, each one the accumulated result of centuries of local burial practice, community memory, and sometimes much older sacred association.

Fohanagh is a small townland in Connemara, a part of Galway where the landscape of bog, rock, and inlet has preserved an unusually dense concentration of archaeological sites. Graveyards in such areas frequently occupy ground that was considered significant long before the arrival of formal parish organisation. Many rural Connacht burial grounds grew up around early medieval ecclesiastical enclosures, or around the remains of a small church or oratory, the walls of which may survive only as a low grassy ridge. Some incorporate ground that served as a cillín, a term used for an informal burial place, often associated with unbaptised infants or others excluded from consecrated ground under older Church rules. Whether Fohanagh fits any of these patterns specifically is not documented in what is currently available, and it would be a mistake to assume one story over another.