That designation alone sets it apart from an ordinary parish graveyard: it suggests origins that predate, or at minimum sit outside, the standard post-Reformation network of Church of Ireland and Catholic burial grounds that organised rural death across most of the country from the seventeenth century onward.

Burying grounds of this type in the west of Ireland frequently cluster around early medieval ecclesiastical sites, sometimes little more than a scrap of enclosure wall and a few worn grave slabs to mark where a local saint's community once gathered. In Connemara particularly, where the land was marginal and population sparse, such places were used continuously across many centuries, accumulating layers of burial that make them genuinely difficult to date without excavation. The placename Cashel, derived from the Irish "caiseal", refers to a stone fort or enclosure, a common enough element in western townland names that often hints at early Christian or even pre-Christian activity nearby. Whether any structural remains survive alongside the burying ground is not currently established in the available record.