At Balreagh in County Westmeath, the roughly oval boundary of the burial ground surrounding a set of medieval church ruins is thought to betray the footprint of a much earlier sacred site, one that predates the Norman and post-Norman landscape by centuries.

In Ireland, the curved or egg-shaped perimeter of a graveyard is often the most durable trace of an Early Christian ecclesiastical enclosure, the boundary that once defined a monastic or church precinct in the early medieval period. Rectangular field boundaries tend to follow the logic of ploughing and property division; an oval one, persisting through centuries of reuse, usually points to deliberate, pre-existing sacred geometry. The scholar Leo Swan identified this pattern across dozens of Irish sites, and his 1988 survey flagged Balreagh as a likely example. The medieval church ruins at the centre of the graveyard post-date any such original enclosure by several centuries, and the memorials within are described as post-medieval in date, meaning the site has accumulated layer upon layer of Christian use across more than a millennium, each phase leaving something behind while obscuring what came before.