At Balisland in County Wicklow, the burial ground known locally as the Yew Tree Graveyard sits within a rectangular earthwork measuring roughly 70 metres by 45 metres, defined by an earth and stone bank with external drystone facing. The headstones, of which there are only a small number, date from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, but the enclosure surrounding them is almost certainly far older. The entrance, framed by dressed granite pillars, sits towards the north-east corner, and the whole structure occupies a gentle south-facing slope, the kind of orientation often favoured for early ecclesiastical or ceremonial sites.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded only the southern section, roughly 35 metres in extent, as a graveyard, suggesting the northern part of the enclosure had already lost its obvious funerary function by that point, or perhaps never had one. Two finds give the site particular depth. A broken granite font lies within the graveyard, its basin subrectangular and V-shaped in section, with a drain-hole, the sort of object associated with early Christian ritual use and water blessing. More recently, in 2012, the Yew Tree Graveyard Restoration Committee uncovered a bullaun stone on the site. A bullaun is a rounded depression deliberately cut or worn into a boulder, often found at early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, where they were used for grinding or, in folk tradition, for healing and cursing. Its discovery here adds to the sense that this quiet enclosure on a Wicklow hillside has a much longer and more layered past than its modest scattering of eighteenth-century headstones might initially suggest.