A graveyard in Nurney, Co. Kildare carries more layers of occupation than its overgrown enclosure immediately suggests. The roughly rectangular area, measuring approximately 55 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, contains the remains of a ruined medieval church, and its burial record itself tells a quiet story of stratification: the older eighteenth and nineteenth-century graves cluster to the south of the church, while more recent burials spread around it on all sides. About 160 metres to the north-north-west lies what may have been a medieval nunnery, and a small stream runs through the shallow valley just to the north, the kind of detail that often signals a much older reason for a site's significance than any surviving stonework can confirm.

The ground beneath and around this place proved unexpectedly informative when, in 2002, archaeological test-trenching was carried out under Excavation Licence no. 02E1126 ahead of a proposed housing development immediately to the south and west. Two of the trial trenches produced medieval pottery, the kind of plain, unglazed local cooking ware that rarely survives intact but which, even as fragments, can anchor a site firmly within a medieval landscape. One sherd came from the surface of a possible curvilinear ditch, the curved boundary type often associated with early ecclesiastical enclosures. More unexpected were the eight parallel north-south furrows uncovered in a trench to the east; medieval pottery recovered from the base of two of those furrows pointed to the possibility that the land immediately adjacent to the graveyard once formed part of a medieval field system, the working agricultural ground of a community that used the church at its edge.