The park looks, to all appearances, like an ordinary piece of suburban green space, and that is precisely the point: it was created by clearing and landscaping what had been a medieval parish graveyard, erasing above-ground traces of a site that had served the local community for centuries.

The graveyard was attached to the medieval parish church of Ballyfermot, a building that the historian D'Alton, writing in 1838, described as being in perfect condition. By 1978, when the Office of Public Works inspected the site, the church itself had been reduced to its foundations, though a number of gravestones of nineteenth-century date were still visible. Twenty years later, in October 1998, archaeological test excavations were carried out at the corner of Le Fanu Road and Raheen Road on the site. Those excavations, reported by O'Donovan in 2000, uncovered the boundary wall of the graveyard along with both articulated and disarticulated human remains inside it. Articulated remains are bones found in their original anatomical position, suggesting undisturbed burials, while disarticulated remains, bones found scattered or out of sequence, typically indicate that earlier graves were disturbed by later ones over a long period of use, which is common on medieval ecclesiastical sites.

Le Fanu Park today gives little indication of any of this. There are no interpretive panels, no marked boundaries, and no visible remnants of either the church or the graveyard. The park sits off Le Fanu Road in the west Dublin suburb of Ballyfermot, and is easily accessible by bus. Anyone with an interest in what lies underneath would do well to look at the 1998 excavation report, as it provides the clearest surviving record of what the ground still holds.