That subtle ridge, visible on aerial photographs as a curving arc, may be all that remains above ground of the enclosing bank of a sixth-century monastery, one of those early Irish ecclesiastical enclosures whose circular or near-circular boundary defined the sacred space of a monastic community. The very name of the place gestures towards it: Drumrath, or Druim-rath, likely combines the Irish word for a ridge with rath, a term for an enclosing earthwork, suggesting that the boundary itself was once prominent enough to give the site its identity.

The monastery at Drumraney was founded by St Éanán, whose feast day falls on the 19th of August and the 18th of September. By 1837, Samuel Lewis recorded that locals still celebrated the saint's festival on the Sunday after the 18th of September. In the sixth century, St Aed is said to have visited Éanán as a hermit of the monastery, which was then described as lying in the west of Meath. The site's history took a violent turn in 946, when the Annals of the Four Masters recorded that a foreign army swept across Druim-raithe and burned the oratory, killing one hundred and fifty people inside. That single entry is a stark reminder of how exposed these monastic communities were during the period of Viking raiding. The quadrantal form of the present graveyard, meaning its roughly quarter-circle shape, has led researchers to propose that the modern burial ground preserves the outline of the original monastic enclosure, with the older southern section sitting within what would have been the inner precinct.

Scattered among the graves in that older southern half are architectural fragments from the medieval church of Drumraney, stonework that has outlasted the building it once belonged to. A holy well dedicated to St Éanán survives around 140 metres to the north-east, and the remains of Drumraney Castle lie roughly 300 metres to the north, the two monuments together suggesting a landscape that accumulated layers of occupation across many centuries around this founding monastic site.