Most graveyards are rectangular. The one tucked into the demesne at Kilkea, County Kildare is not. Its boundary wall, built sometime after 1700, traces an irregular polygonal outline, roughly 42 metres on its north-north-west to south-south-east axis and 59 metres east to west. That slightly awkward, many-sided shape is often a signal that an enclosure is following an older boundary, one laid down long before the wall itself was built, possibly the footprint of an early ecclesiastical site that determined the shape of things long after its original function had faded.

The northern quadrant of the enclosure contains the ruins of a church, and Kilkea Castle sits just 55 metres to the north-west. The proximity is not coincidental. Kilkea is one of the oldest inhabited castle sites in Ireland, and the relationship between a castle, its associated church, and a burial ground arranged around it reflects a pattern common across medieval Irish lordships, where spiritual and secular authority were kept deliberately close. The post-1700 boundary wall suggests the graveyard was formally reorganised or consolidated in the early modern period, even if the ground it encloses had been in use considerably longer.