That much is certain. Beyond it, the details remain elusive, which is itself a kind of description: this is a place that exists in the documentary record as a presence without a biography, a site whose age, denomination, and history have not yet been made publicly available.

Burial grounds of this type in rural Mayo range from early medieval ecclesiastical enclosures to post-suppression informal graveyards used by communities who had lost access to consecrated land, sometimes called cilliní, which were often used for the burial of unbaptised infants or others excluded from formal Church burial. Whether Ara fits any of these categories is not currently known from what has been published. The townland name itself, Ara, derives from the Irish and may relate to a kidney or loin shape in the landscape, a common enough origin for place names in the west of Ireland, though it offers no direct clue about the ground's origins or use.