Churchfield, a townland in County Mayo, carries the kind of name that signals the presence of something older beneath or beside it, a field that once belonged to, or grew up around, a church. The burying ground there belongs to a category of site found across rural Ireland: a patch of ground set apart for the dead, often predating the official parish system, sometimes attached to the ruins of an early medieval church, and frequently continuing in use for centuries after any standing structure had disappeared.

Burying grounds of this type, sometimes called cillíní when associated with the unconsecrated burial of unbaptised infants, or simply old graveyards when serving a wider community, were a central feature of the pre-Reformation and post-Reformation landscape alike. In Mayo particularly, where early Christian monasticism left a dense scatter of small ecclesiastical sites across the countryside, it is not unusual to find a field containing low earthworks, a few worn stones, and a local memory of burial that stretches back further than any written record. The name Churchfield suggests a church once stood here, or was at least remembered as having stood here, even if nothing of it now remains above ground.