On a low hillock at the north-eastern edge of Tynagh village in County Galway, a rectilinear burial ground sits within undulating pastureland, its mortared stone walls capped with concrete in the practical manner of rural Irish maintenance. The site measures roughly sixty metres on its longer axis and forty-five on the shorter, and access has traditionally been through a gateway and stile at the south-west corner. What makes it worth a second look is that, at some point in recent years, the northern wall was largely removed to accommodate an expansion, with a new entrance and pathway cut from the road to the west. A working graveyard in the process of extending itself has a particular quality, somewhere between the ancient and the administrative, that most people simply drive past.

The oldest inscribed grave-markers here date from the mid-eighteenth century, and the majority of these have been moved or have settled against the western wall, as often happens in older Irish burial grounds where successive generations tidy, shift, or consolidate earlier stones. A number of small uninscribed markers are also present, the kind that typically indicate graves of the very poor, unbaptised infants, or simply those whose families could not afford carved lettering. Presiding over the whole site is a large wooden crucifix, which marks the location of an earlier church whose remains are recorded separately. The association of a graveyard with a now-vanished or ruined church is extremely common in the Irish landscape; communities continued to bury their dead on ground already considered sacred long after the building itself had gone.