They stand alongside the more legible headstones of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they belong to an altogether different layer of time, one that connects this quiet enclosure to an early Irish ecclesiastical site known as Cill-Tonachta.

The scholar John O'Donovan recorded the name Cill-Tonachta for this place, identifying it as the site of an old church and burial ground. The graveyard itself is roughly rectangular, measuring about 31.5 metres east to west and 20.5 metres north to south, enclosed by a low drystone wall approximately a metre in height. At the southern end of the western wall, a gateway provides the only entry point. Inside, near the centre of the enclosure, the fragmentary foundations of the east and south walls of the church survive at ground level, the remnants of what was once a more complete structure. Scattered around the site are architectural fragments that have outlasted the building they belonged to: a corbel stone, which would originally have projected from a wall to support a roof or floor; a window sill stone; a jambstone from a doorway or window opening; and several pieces of dressed stone. These fragments, sitting loose in the grass or propped against walls, suggest a church of some ambition, even if very little of it now remains above ground.

The gateway in the western wall is the practical way in, and once inside, it is worth looking carefully at ground level near the centre of the enclosure, where the church foundations are visible. The architectural fragments are distributed across the site and easy to overlook at first, but they reward a slow circuit of the graveyard.