The element "rath" points to a ringfort, one of those circular earthen enclosures that dot the Irish landscape in their thousands, built during the early medieval period as farmstead enclosures for people of some local standing. That a graveyard should occupy or adjoin such a site is not unusual in Ireland, where the boundaries between the ancient, the sacred, and the domestic have always been loosely drawn, and where communities, across many centuries, chose to bury their dead in places that already carried a sense of age and significance.

The practice of burying the dead within or beside a rath was sometimes a matter of proximity and sometimes a matter of meaning. Such sites were already understood to be old, already freighted with a certain presence, and the ground around them was often treated as consecrated or at least set apart. In parts of the west of Ireland, graveyards of this kind continued to receive burials long after any formal ecclesiastical structure had vanished or perhaps had never existed at all. What remains in Rathnacreeva today is a record of that layering, a piece of ground in south Mayo where the dead were placed in a landscape that was already ancient when the first of them was buried there.