Churchfield, in County Mayo, is the kind of townland name that signals something older beneath the surface, a field that once held, or stood beside, a church now gone. The graveyard that remains is among those sites that persist in the landscape long after the structures that gave them meaning have disappeared, marked on maps, recorded as monuments, but sparsely documented in any publicly accessible form.

In Ireland, graveyards of this type frequently predate the formal parish system reorganised under English administration, and in many cases overlie early medieval or even early Christian burial grounds. The name Churchfield suggests the former presence of a church or chapel, possibly a simple nave-and-chancel structure or even an earlier timber oratory, that has since vanished entirely, leaving only the burial ground as evidence of the community that gathered there. Mayo has a dense concentration of such sites, a consequence of its long ecclesiastical history stretching back to the age of saints and monasteries, and of the disruptions, from the Reformation through to the clearances of the nineteenth century, that left many rural congregations without maintained buildings.