At Kiltiernan in County Galway, a roughly square graveyard of about thirty metres on each side sits just east of centre within a larger ecclesiastical enclosure, its boundary now a collapsed double-faced wall, the kind of careful stonework that signals deliberate, long-term use rather than casual or temporary occupation.

A series of excavations carried out by Duignan in 1950, 1951, and 1953 brought over twenty burials to light in and around the church that occupies the south-western half of the enclosure. Almost all of the skeletons were found fully extended and laid on their backs, the standard Christian burial posture, though one individual was discovered with knees drawn up towards the stomach, an arrangement that stands quietly apart from its neighbours without obvious explanation. More telling still, some of the burials pre-dated the church itself, meaning people were using this ground as a place of the dead before any formal structure was raised above it. Artefacts were sparse, but what was found pointed to activity stretching from the early medieval period, possibly as far back as the 9th century, through the medieval and into the post-medieval era. The presence of infant and neonate burials also suggests that the site served, at some point in its later history, as a cillín, a children's burial ground of the kind used across Ireland for unbaptised infants who could not, by the conventions of the time, be interred in consecrated ground. That such burials appear here, within an existing ecclesiastical enclosure, adds a layer of ambiguity to the site's history that the archaeology alone cannot fully resolve.