A graveyard that rises gently towards its own centre is an unusual thing. At Castlefarm in County Kildare, a large rectangular enclosure, roughly 62 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south, sits on a low pasture ridge and swells upward to a ruined church at its highest point. The mortared stone wall that surrounds the whole site gives it a deliberate, bounded quality, as though the landscape itself has been gathered in and held still.

The ruined church at the centre of the enclosure suggests origins that predate the legible grave markers, which date from the nineteenth century, by some considerable stretch. Just to the east, the ground holds the site of a castle, the two monuments sitting in close proximity in a way that was not unusual in medieval Ireland, where ecclesiastical and defensive structures were frequently neighbours, each lending the other a degree of permanence and authority. The name Castlefarm preserves something of that pairing, the castle now reduced to a site rather than a structure, but still traceable in the field.