At Grange in County Kilkenny, though, the evidence is surprisingly thin on the ground. The graveyard enclosing the church is an unusual pentagonal shape, measuring roughly 32 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, and the whole enclosure sits just 80 metres or so from the riverbank, raised just enough above the surrounding plain to keep it clear of the worst of the flooding.

The medieval church occupies the south-western portion of the graveyard, a positioning that hints at an older, more deliberate arrangement of the space. Yet when the historian William Carrigan examined the site in the early twentieth century, he found it remarkably unremarkable in one specific sense. Writing in 1905, he noted that the graveyard contained about half a dozen inscribed monuments, but none of them ancient. The headstones that survive date largely to the nineteenth century, meaning that whatever earlier generations of burials may have taken place here, they left no legible stone record. That gap between a clearly medieval ecclesiastical site and a graveyard populated almost entirely by Victorian-era memorials is quietly puzzling. The modern wall enclosing the site does little to suggest the age of what it contains.