What is quietly notable, however, is the absence of something rather than its presence: despite the medieval origins of the site, no graveslabs dating to before 1700 have been identified here. For a place of such antiquity, that gap is worth pausing over.

The slabs that do survive are 18th-century in date, and they appear on chest-tombs and individual graves both within the abbey itself and in the older sections of the surrounding graveyard. A chest-tomb is essentially a box-shaped raised monument, with a flat or slightly pitched slab forming the lid, and they were a common way of marking the graves of more prosperous families from the 17th century onwards. The absence of earlier inscribed stonework does not necessarily mean no one was commemorated before 1700; medieval grave markers were often simple, uninscribed, and vulnerable to loss or reuse over time. What remains is a 18th-century layer of funerary memory laid over a much older foundation.