At the south-east corner of a graveyard in Knockeen, County Waterford, the boundary wall contains something that was already ancient when the first Christians in the area began burying their dead nearby: a portal tomb, the megalithic monument type characterised by two or more upright stones supporting a large capstone, dating in most Irish examples to the Neolithic period, roughly four to six thousand years ago. Rather than clearing the monument away, whoever laid out or extended the graveyard simply absorbed it into the fabric of the wall itself. The effect is quietly strange, a monument built for the dead of one era folded into a space built for the dead of another.

The graveyard, which sits on a gentle south-facing slope, is rectangular in plan and measures approximately 65 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south. It belongs to the parish church of Kilburne, and the pairing of an early ecclesiastical site with a pre-existing megalith is not unusual in Ireland; early church founders frequently chose locations already marked as significant in the landscape. What is less common is the degree to which the portal tomb has been physically incorporated into the graveyard's perimeter rather than simply standing nearby. The south-east corner of the wall is, in effect, built around it.