What looks at first glance like a straightforwardly modern burial ground, its headstones almost entirely twentieth-century marble, is in fact layered over a much older sacred landscape. The ground itself is the thing of interest here, not what sits on top of it.

Annaghdown was the site of a significant early medieval monastic complex, and this graveyard sits immediately to the north of the old church, a relationship that almost certainly reflects centuries of continuous use of the same hallowed ground. When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1838, the burial area was recorded as a roughly rectangular, unenclosed plot, approximately fifty metres north to south and forty metres east to west, marked only with a broken line to indicate its uncertain or informal boundaries at the time. That modest, open rectangle has since been absorbed into a considerably larger modern graveyard, which has expanded southwards and eastwards of the church, and is now bounded by plastered concrete walls with piers along the eastern side, and mass concrete walls on the north, west, and south. Access comes through an iron gateway set into the eastern wall, with a stile positioned just to its south.

The point where the older ground ends and the later extension begins is no longer visible on the surface, the two areas having merged into a single continuous space. A visitor who knows what to look for, however, is essentially standing within the footprint of a burial ground that was already old enough to appear on a nineteenth-century map as an established feature of the Annaghdown monastic site, even if nothing above ground now marks that distinction.