That curve is the clue. Straight lines belong to planners and developers; arcs like this one tend to be older than either, and they tend to mean something.

The graveyard sits just north of the junction of Stillorgan Road and Merville Road, and it is associated with the site of a medieval church and a graveslab, both recorded in the Archaeological Survey of Ireland. What draws the attention of researchers, however, is the shape of the enclosing wall itself. An early ecclesiastical enclosure, sometimes called a termon, was typically a roughly circular or oval boundary that marked out sacred ground around an early Irish church, often dating to the early medieval period. The curving plan of the present walled boundary here is considered, by compilers Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, to indicate the possible existence of just such an enclosure beneath or behind the later fabric. The word "possible" is doing real work in that sentence; this is a reading of landscape form rather than a confirmed excavated feature, but it is a reading with considerable precedent elsewhere in Ireland.

The site is urban and unassuming, which is partly what makes it worth knowing about. There is no dramatic ruin to photograph, and the graveyard wall will not announce itself as ancient. What a visitor can do is stand at the junction of Stillorgan Road and Merville Road and look north, paying attention to the line of the boundary rather than what lies within it. The arc, once you are looking for it, is legible even against the surrounding grid of roads and walls. The graveslab associated with the site is recorded separately in the survey, though its current condition and precise location within the site are not detailed in the available notes. As with many such urban ecclesiastical survivals, the interest lies less in any single monument and more in what the accumulated details, a curve here, a slab there, suggest about how long this particular patch of ground has been considered worth enclosing.