It appears on Ordnance Survey maps from 1834 and again in 1907, marked plainly as a graveyard, yet it carries an older, stranger name in local memory: Shane Moat. The enclosure is rectangular and slightly elevated, measuring roughly 27 by 23 metres, its boundary formed by the foundations and remnants of a wall faced with slabs set on edge. A slab-lined entrance opens in the middle of the south-eastern side. Inside, the grave markers are not headstones in any conventional sense but lines of small stones and thin slabs laid into the ground, the kind of burial practice associated with communities that had neither the resources nor, at certain points in Irish history, the legal freedom to bury their dead through official channels.

Local tradition, recorded in the Irish Folklore Commission Schools' Manuscripts, holds that this ground was used during the Penal times and again during the Famine. The Penal Laws, which from the late seventeenth century restricted Catholic religious practice across Ireland, pushed worship and burial alike into informal, often outdoor spaces. Graveyards without churches, sometimes called cillíní or simply "killeens" in other contexts, served communities who could not or would not use established burial grounds. That this place retained a distinct name, Shane Moat, suggests it occupied a particular place in local consciousness long after its most active period of use. There is no evidence of any church structure ever having stood here, which makes the site all the more quietly anomalous: a place of deliberate communal burial, organised enough to have a walled enclosure and a formal entrance, yet operating entirely outside the institutional structures that normally governed the dead.