Most post-medieval burial grounds are roughly rectangular, following the logic of field division and property boundaries. This one is oval, and that oval is not an accident. An ecclesiastical enclosure of Early Christian date, typically a roughly circular or oval boundary defining the sacred precinct of a monastery or church, often survives long after its original structures have vanished, preserved in the curve of a later wall or the arc of a hedgerow. At Faughalstown, the boundary wall of the existing graveyard appears to trace exactly that kind of inherited outline.

The enclosure is thought to be associated with a monastery founded by Diarmuid, son of Lughna, the patron saint of the parish of Faughalstown. The connection between a curving graveyard wall and a much older monastic foundation is not straightforward to establish, but the geometry here makes a persuasive case. More telling still is what lies beyond the graveyard's northern wall. Approximately forty metres to the north, a curving field boundary follows a line that seems to represent the outer edge of a still earlier and larger enclosure, one that has long since lost its original function but persists quietly in the landscape as a slight arc in the pattern of fields. The graveyard wall, in other words, may mark only the inner zone of a complex that once extended considerably further.