Tradition holds that a thirteenth-century church once stood here, but when the site is examined closely, neither the foundations nor any other physical trace of such a building can be found. What remains instead is a scattering of headstones dating from the early to mid-eighteenth century, quietly marking graves without any visible connection to the older, more dramatic past that local memory has assigned to the place.

The gap between tradition and evidence is the most compelling thing about Boystown burial ground. Liam Price, writing in 1953, noted the site and recorded the local belief while also acknowledging the absence of corroborating archaeology. It is a pattern that recurs across Ireland, where the memory of a church or a holy foundation clings to a piece of ground long after any structure has vanished, or perhaps long after a building that was never there at all became part of the landscape's story. The headstones that do survive belong to a much later period, suggesting that by the 1700s the site was functioning as a recognised place of burial, whatever its earlier history may or may not have been.