An esker is a long, winding ridge of gravel and sand deposited by meltwater streams beneath a retreating glacier, and the people of early medieval Ireland recognised these elevated, dry spines in the landscape as useful and sometimes sacred ground. This particular ridge runs northeast to southwest, and the graveyard occupies its northeastern summit, a position that feels deliberately chosen rather than incidental.

Researcher Claffey, writing in 1983, proposed that this may originally have been the site of a dísert, an early Irish term for a hermitage or place of withdrawal associated with an ascetic holy figure. The saint in question would be Fechín, a seventh-century monastic founder whose cult was active in Connacht. The graveyard's outline has shifted over the centuries: the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it as irregularly shaped, while by the 1931 edition it had settled into a distinctive D-shape, roughly fifty metres along its northeast-southwest axis and forty metres across, with a curving western wall that may preserve the line of an earlier enclosure. The church associated with the site once stood at the northern end, and it is around this area that the oldest burials cluster, marked not by inscribed headstones but by small, plain, uninscribed upright stones. Claffey also noted a separate concentration of uprights on the southern section of the hilltop that may indicate even earlier graves, though these have not since been formally located. The strangeness of the place extends beyond the graveyard boundary: aerial reconnaissance in July 1968 picked up unexplained cropmarks to the northwest, and in the 1970s two dugout canoes were recovered from marshy ground a short distance to the southeast, suggesting a much longer and more varied human engagement with this corner of the esker than the graveyard alone would imply.