The six-inch maps produced from that survey are remarkably thorough documents, capturing field boundaries, ruins, and the faintest outlines of earlier occupation across the Irish landscape, which makes the absence of any trace here quietly telling.

The church with which this graveyard is associated, recorded separately, points to a site of some ecclesiastical antiquity. In rural Ireland, such pairings were common: a small early or medieval church serving a local community, with burials accumulating in the ground around it over generations. By the mid-nineteenth century, many such sites had fallen so completely out of use, or had been so thoroughly absorbed back into farmland, that even the Ordnance Survey could find no surface evidence. Whether the burials at Cloonderreen were already invisible by 1842, lost beneath pasture or cultivation, or whether the graveyard's association with the church rests on older documentary or local sources rather than physical remains, is not clear. What remains is the record itself, noting an absence, and the question of what once occupied that ground.