The burial ground at Kilferagh, dedicated to St Fiachra and set within a band of woodland about 130 metres west of the River Nore in County Kilkenny, had none of that. When the first Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1839, and again when surveyors returned in 1900, the graveyard's outline was marked with a dashed line, the cartographic convention for an unenclosed space. No fosse, no rampart, no wall. The ground simply became sacred at some point, without being formally delimited from the surrounding landscape.

The site sits on raised ground within woodland that opens southward to accommodate both the church of St Fiachra and the graveyard, with St Fiachra's Well lying about 70 metres to the south-east. Such groupings, a church, a burial ground, and a holy well in close proximity, are a recurring pattern in early Irish ecclesiastical settlements, where water sources carried devotional as well as practical significance. The graveyard itself is roughly oval, measuring approximately 34 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west. Writing in 1839, the Ordnance Survey Letters noted it plainly as a small burying ground. The Kilkenny historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, was more precise: he counted only three inscribed monuments, dating from 1758 to 1869, alongside some rough headstones and, notably, a stone effigy of a cleric. An effigy of this kind, a carved recumbent or standing figure representing a churchman, is an unusual survival in a modest rural graveyard, and its presence hints at an earlier layer of significance that the sparse inscribed record does not fully explain.