At Clogh in County Kilkenny, the ground on a rise beside the Cloch River has been used for burial continuously since at least the thirteenth century, yet not a stone of the original church that once stood here survives above ground. What remains is the layered evidence of centuries of use, compressed into an irregularly shaped enclosure measuring roughly 77 metres north to south and 137 metres east to west.

The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, noted that the first church on the site was built in the thirteenth century, though he was clear that no physical trace of it remained even by his time. The Roman Catholic church now standing roughly at the centre of the graveyard is an eighteenth-century structure, occupying ground that has almost certainly held a place of worship for five hundred years before it. The oldest headstone Carrigan recorded dates to 1706, and there are many others from the same century. The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1839 shows the graveyard's north-eastern and southern boundaries as curving lines, a detail that hints at earlier, organic boundary-making rather than the straight lines of deliberate planning. At some point after that survey was made, the enclosure was extended eastward into a rectangular field, giving the site the slightly composite shape it has today, one part ancient and curved, one part later and geometric. Burials from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are well represented throughout, so the site reads less as a relic than as a place that simply kept being used, generation after generation, without interruption.