No headstones, no enclosing wall, no earthwork ridge to trace with your foot. What we know of it comes almost entirely from a dotted outline on an 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it was recorded as a roughly circular area approximately twenty-five metres in diameter. By the time the archaeologist O'Kelly visited and wrote about it in 1944, he could report only that no trace survived, and that there was no sign of the graveyard said to have surrounded it. The site exists now largely as a cartographic memory.

What makes Rathanny particularly curious is the absence of a church. Many early Irish burial grounds, especially those associated with holy wells and local saints, grew up around a small ecclesiastical structure, even a very modest one. Here, there is no evidence that any church was ever present inside the enclosure. The burial ground's most notable neighbour is Tobergobbun, also recorded as St Gobban's Well, which lies around twenty metres to the north and carries its own monument record. The pairing of a saint's well with a nearby burial ground, without any church between them, suggests an older or more informal pattern of sacred use, one that predates or simply bypassed the formal institutional church. A further clue appears on the 1897 Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map, where a curve in a local watercourse may reflect the original enclosing element of the burial ground's western side, the landscape quietly preserving a shape that nothing above ground now describes.

For anyone making their way out to Rathanny, the experience is likely to be one of interpretation rather than observation. The OS maps, particularly the 1840 six-inch edition available through the Irish Historic Maps viewer online, are the most useful tools for understanding what once occupied this ground. The well, St Gobban's Well, offers a more tangible point of reference nearby and may help orient a visit. The surrounding farmland is private, so permission and preparation matter. What you are looking for, in truth, is a subtlety: the slight bend of a field drain, a softness in the ground's contour, the kind of detail that repays patience rather than a quick glance.