Nobody now knows who those stones mark. They predate the earliest legible headstones on the site, which date only to the late nineteenth century, and they carry no text, no ornament, no name. The ground they occupy has clearly been used for burial over a very long period, yet much of that history has quietly slipped out of reach.

At the centre of the enclosure stand the ruins of Kilnamanagh church, a medieval foundation whose name references a monastery, suggesting the site's origins may lie in early Christian religious settlement. In 1842, a new church was built immediately to the north-west of the graveyard wall, presumably to serve a community that still regarded this ground as its proper place of burial. That building is now roofless, its congregation long gone, leaving the two structures side by side in different states of ruin and disuse. The graveyard itself, however, has not been entirely abandoned; it remains in occasional use, which gives the site an unusual quality, somewhere that has not quite finished its original purpose even as the buildings around it have ceased to function.