No names, no dates, no carved ornament. They occupy their own quiet corner, separated from the legible dead, and their anonymity is precisely what makes them worth noticing.

The graveyard itself is a subrectangular enclosure, roughly thirty metres east to west and fifty metres north to south, bounded by an overgrown earthen bank. At its centre stand the ruins of the parish church of Ballyspillane, and the inscribed headstones are grouped around it. Researchers Coleman, writing between 1913 and 1916, recorded inscriptions going back to 1753, while O Buachalla and Henchion, writing in 1964, counted twenty-eight headstones in total. Among those are two commemorating Catholic priests, dated 1759 and 1780. That detail is worth pausing on: in the mid-eighteenth century, Ireland was still formally governed by the Penal Laws, a body of legislation that restricted Catholic worship and the public role of Catholic clergy. To find priests memorialised by name, in stone, at a fixed location, speaks to the complex and often pragmatic realities of how those laws were observed and ignored at a local level. The graveyard, with its earthen enclosure and ruined church, likely has origins considerably older than the eighteenth-century headstones suggest.