This one lies within a small wood on a slight rise in the valley floor surrounding Shankill Castle in County Kilkenny, with open views out across the gently rolling landscape in every direction. The graveyard is enclosed by a wrought-iron fence and measures roughly 32.5 metres north-northeast to south-southwest and 42 metres west-northwest to east-southeast, a sub-rectangular shape that hints at boundaries laid down long before anyone thought to measure them precisely.

At the centre of the enclosure stands a medieval church, the kind of roofless or ruined nave that appears throughout the Irish countryside as a reminder that many landscapes were once far more densely organised around parish worship than they appear today. The graveyard almost certainly predates the castle's parkland setting by several centuries, with the estate effectively growing up around an older sacred site rather than displacing it. The earliest recorded memorial marks the entrance to a burial vault belonging to the Alyward family, dating to the early eighteenth century. The Alywards were a notable Kilkenny family, and the vault suggests a degree of prestige and permanence, a family investing in its own visible continuity in stone at a time when such gestures carried considerable social weight.