The burial ground at Tievegarriff is recorded by name on the OS 1:2500 plan surveyed between 1912 and 1916, but no physical trace of it survives today. Private burial grounds of this kind, maintained within the grounds of a landed family's estate rather than in a parish churchyard, were not uncommon among County Galway's Protestant gentry in the nineteenth century, and the Persse family maintained at least two others in the county.

The story of this particular plot begins with a death. Henry Sadlier Persse, a distillery owner with extensive landholdings in Galway, purchased Glenarde House, a property built around 1840 and previously associated with the Lynch family, in 1862. That same year he married Eleanor Alice Seymour, and together they had ten children. On 12 January 1877, their third child, John Beauchamp, died of meningitis aged five and a half years. It seems likely that this loss prompted the family to establish a private burial ground on the Glenarde grounds, roughly 260 metres to the south-south-west of the house, rather than bury the boy at a distance. The register of St Nicholas' Church in Galway records four subsequent interments at the same site: a daughter, Matilda Theodora, who died on 16 August 1881; Henry Sadlier Persse's sister, Henrietta Burton Persse, who died on 3 October 1886; another daughter, Noel Marjorie, who died on 1 May 1888; and Henry Sadlier Persse himself, who died on 11 March 1899. The burial ground was, in other words, a family plot opened in grief and quietly filled over two decades.

Glenarde House was sold in 1922 to Patrick Boland, and then again in 1961 to Patrick D. Ryan and his wife, who converted the property into the hotel it remains today. When the adjoining lands were later sold for residential development, the burial ground was built over. The remains were removed beforehand and reinterred in a vault at Bohermore Cemetery in Galway, recorded there as Grave No. K. Vault 10. The Persse family's private ground at Tievegarriff has left no mark on the ground, only a faint outline on a century-old map and a handful of entries in a church register.