Most graveyards accumulate history quietly, one burial at a time. The one on the eastern edge of Ballymore Eustace, set on a south-facing slope in County Kildare, has been accumulating it for considerably longer than most. Alongside the leaning chest tombs and broken headstones of the 18th century and after, the enclosure holds two high crosses, two cross-inscribed slabs, seven graveslabs, a holed stone, and a medieval font, all of which point to a site of real ecclesiastical weight long before the Normans arrived in Ireland. The density of early Christian stonework here is the kind of thing you might expect at a well-known monastic site, not tucked beside a working parish.

The roughly square enclosure, around 82 metres east to west and 80 metres north to south, is bounded by a well-built stone wall with a gate and stile at the northwest corner and a further gate to the southeast. Mature beech and yew trees grow throughout, the yew being a species with long associations with Irish sacred sites. To the rear of a 19th-century church stands the fragmentary remains of a medieval church, and inside the later building a second medieval font has been preserved, along with a 16th-century knightly effigy, a carved recumbent figure of the type used to mark the burial of a man of high social rank. High crosses, which are free-standing carved stone crosses developed in Ireland from roughly the 7th century onwards, are not commonly found in such numbers outside major ecclesiastical centres, which makes their presence here, alongside the inscribed slabs and graveslabs, a strong indicator that this place held significant religious and community importance well into the medieval period.

The site is accessible via the northwest gate and stile, and the stonework is distributed across the enclosure rather than concentrated in any single spot, so it rewards a slow circuit. The older fragments and crosses are in the vicinity of the ruined medieval church at the rear of the 19th-century building, and visitors with an eye for early medieval carving will find that the combination of high crosses, slabs, and fonts in a single enclosure makes this a remarkably layered place to read.