The graveyard at the centre of Clane, County Kildare, is not quite the shape you would expect. Rather than the roughly rectangular plots typical of later parish burial grounds, this one traces a D-shape, approximately fifty metres across east to west, with a straight western side running about fifty metres north to south and a gently curving eastern boundary. That curve is not accidental. It almost certainly preserves the outline of a much older enclosure, one that predates the Norman church, the medieval village, and most of what we recognise as Clane today.

The site almost certainly occupies the ground of the Early Christian monastery known as Cluain Damh, a name meaning something close to "meadow of the ox" in Irish. Monastic enclosures of this period, typically defined by a circular or oval ditch and bank, frequently determined the shape of later settlements built over or around them; the curve of a graveyard wall can sometimes be the only surviving trace of a foundation that once shaped an entire landscape. The graveyard sits on the highest ground in the village, which would have made it a natural focal point for religious activity across many centuries. Within it stands St Michael's parish church, and a seventeenth-century tomb associated with the Wogan family, a name with deep roots in Kildare, where the family held considerable land and influence during the medieval and early modern periods.