The transformation is documented with quiet matter-of-factness across successive Ordnance Survey maps: a burial ground that did not exist on paper in 1842, that appeared as a named site by 1904, and that was recorded as disused and absorbed into domestic garden ground by 1938. A century of cartographic snapshots, and the place moves from invisibility to recognition to erasure in the space of three map editions.

What makes the site's history particularly pointed is its location. The 1904 map places it to the south-west of a Union Workhouse, and that proximity is significant. Union workhouses were the institutional backbone of Poor Law relief in nineteenth-century Ireland, built following the Irish Poor Law Act of 1838 and designed to house the destitute in conditions deliberately kept harsh enough to deter all but the most desperate. During the Famine years of the late 1840s they were overwhelmed, and many workhouses established their own burial grounds for inmates who died within their walls, people who had no family able to claim them or no resources to arrange burial elsewhere. Whether that is the precise origin of the Gurteenroe ground is not recorded, but the timeline fits: invisible in 1842, present and named by the early twentieth century, already falling out of use by the 1930s. The ground may have served the workhouse population, or may have grown up in its shadow for related reasons, but its association with that institution gives it a particular weight.

The site is on private property and access has not been recorded as available, so there is little a visitor could practically do beyond noting where it once appeared on older maps.