At Gleninagh on the Co. Clare coast, that layering is unusually legible. The rectangular enclosure, roughly 42 metres by 24 metres, sits on improved pasture about 300 metres south of the foreshore, within the southwest quadrant of what survives of a poorly preserved ecclesiastical enclosure. The surrounding wall, mortared and standing to 1.7 metres, is entered through an iron gate set in well-dressed stone piers on the south-southwest side, a formally considered entrance to a space that otherwise carries the marks of considerable age.

At the northern end of the interior stands a rectangular medieval church, and south of it the ground preserves something less immediately obvious: regularly spaced north-to-south lines of small flags and boulders, set between 1.8 and 2.3 metres apart. These are the traces of earlier burial organisation, understated now but once a structured system. Two slab-lined graves lie roughly 6.5 metres south of the church, set about 2.5 metres apart. Slab-lined graves, in which flat stones define the sides and sometimes the ends of the burial cut, are a form found across early medieval Irish burial grounds. One of the Gleninagh examples is outlined by irregular limestone blocks projecting barely a centimetre above the turf, with flat flags at its east end and a single undressed limestone slab, 0.9 metres high, standing upright at its west end. The other is larger, at 3 metres by 1.9 metres, defined by a double line of small undressed stone blocks. Neither carries inscription or ornament. To their south and west, more formally marked twentieth-century graves occupy the same ground, and several small grassed-over clearance cairns stand towards the southern boundary, the result of stones being gathered and piled during tidying of the enclosure over the years.