But the circularity of the enclosure here, roughly 24 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, is a shape that predates Christianity in Ireland. Early ecclesiastical sites were frequently established within or alongside pre-existing circular enclosures, and Sheepstown preserves that layering in unusually legible form: the graveyard itself sits inside a slightly larger circular enclosure beyond it, one ring containing another, both now bounded by a modern stone wall that does little to disguise the age of the arrangement beneath.

The ruined church occupying the northern half of the graveyard dates to the twelfth century and is aligned east to west in the standard liturgical fashion. Its patron, according to the ecclesiastical historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, was St. Muicin, also rendered as Muicceen, whose feast day fell on the 4th of March. Beyond that, the saint is obscure, which itself tells a story about the texture of early Irish Christianity, populated by local holy figures whose cults were intensely regional and whose names rarely travelled far. Only seven headstones survive in the southern portion of the graveyard, ranging from the late eighteenth century through to the twentieth, among them a pseudo-Celtic cross erected in 1954. Two further burials were added in 2007 and 2008, slotted into existing family plots. Alongside the carved stones, a scatter of small, unworked stones marks other graves, the kind of quiet, unlettered commemoration that predates the fashion for inscribed memorials and continued long after it took hold elsewhere.