Where headstones stand in rows elsewhere within this rectangular enclosure, that sector is simply bare, the memorials gone. It is the kind of absence that is harder to explain than a presence, and it sits uneasily alongside a description written in 1907, when the burial ground was recorded as so densely packed with graves that the accumulated earth had risen almost to the level of the church windows and sat considerably above the floor inside.

The graveyard, which measures roughly 27 metres north to south and 38 metres east to west, is enclosed by a post-medieval stone wall and entered through a gateway set into the centre of the western side. The Church of Ireland church at Timogue stands at its centre, with a more recent extension to the east. What the site cannot offer is any memorial that predates 1700, which is itself a curious gap for a place that O'Hanlon and O'Leary, writing in 1907, regarded as having been of considerable importance in former times. The language they used was pointed: the veneration attached to this burial ground, and the sheer crowded density of graves, spoke to a significance that the physical record today only partially reflects. The removal of the headstones from the southern quadrant, whenever and for whatever reason it occurred, has made that gap more pronounced still, leaving a graveyard that tells two quite different stories depending on which part of it you are standing in.