On a steep-sided ridge in County Kildare, a graveyard occupies a roughly rectangular plot of around sixty metres by forty metres, sharing its ground with a round tower and the remains of a medieval parish church. Round towers, the tall, pencil-thin stone structures built across Ireland from roughly the ninth century onwards, were most commonly associated with monastic settlements, used variously as bell towers and places of refuge. Their presence in a landscape almost always signals that something older and more complex lies beneath the surface of what a visitor sees today.

The graveyard at Oughterard sits prominently on its ridge, with views extending in all directions across the surrounding countryside. Legible burial markers survive from the eighteenth century, though the earliest recorded inscription reaches back to 1700. It commemorates Thomas Bacon, who died on the third of March that year at the age of eighty-three. The stone reads, in the orthography of its time: 'This burial place belongeth to, John Daniel Bacon, for his posticity. Here liet the body of, Thomas Bacon, who departed this life, 3rd March 1700, aged, 83 years.' The word 'posticity', an archaic and phonetically spelled rendering of 'posterity', gives the inscription a quietly human quality; John Daniel Bacon was staking a claim for his family in the ground, in the language available to him, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Whether Thomas was his father or another relation the stone does not say, and the record goes no further on that point.