The headstones in question did not begin their existence as building material; they were lifted from a rath at Aghnashingan, a ringfort that had, at some point, doubled as a place of burial.

A rath, in basic terms, is a circular earthwork enclosure, typically of early medieval date in Ireland, and their interiors were occasionally repurposed in later centuries for uses their builders never intended. In this case, by the time a report was compiled in 1976, local knowledge had preserved the fact that the interior of the rath had functioned as a graveyard. The headstones, at some point before that report, had been removed and incorporated into the field boundary lying to the north-west. The 1976 account does not record when the removal happened, who carried it out, or how many stones were involved, which leaves the burial ground itself as something of an open question: a place where people were interred, commemorated with markers, and then quietly dismantled into the surrounding landscape.