The squared-off enclosing banks, the planted trees, the neatly laid roadway, and the family vault all speak to nineteenth-century improvement and landed authority. But within the graveyard's centre, arranged inside the ghostly outline of a much older enclosure, lie cross-slabs of an entirely different era, including one thin rectangular flag bearing a Latin cross with triangular expanded terminals, the kind of early medieval incised stonework that predates the Norman arrival in Ireland by centuries.

When Laurence Dunne conducted a graveyard survey here in 2010, the scale of what had been overlooked became clear. Sixteen previously unrecorded cross-slabs were identified at Ráithín Uí Bhuaigh, also known as Raheenyhooig, bringing the total number of archaeological artefacts recorded on the site to at least thirty. The cross-slabs cluster within the limits of an earlier enclosure, a raheen, the Irish term for a small rath or ringfort-type enclosure, whose original curving outline is still legible in the topography. That earlier boundary is itself visible on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1896, rendered in hachures, even as the same map documents the extensive remodelling carried out by Lord Ventry in 1870. His interventions, which included the construction of a mausoleum recorded on the map simply as "Vault", effectively layered a Victorian estate aesthetic over what was already a site with deep early Christian roots. The stone numbered 90 in Dunne's survey, a Latin cross whose arms terminate in triangular expansions, is one of the more precisely described survivors of that earlier phase, cut into a thin flag in a manner consistent with early medieval practice across the Dingle Peninsula.