But the burial ground at Bawnmore in north Cork carries several layers of strangeness beyond its folklore. The oval enclosure, roughly fifty metres across on its longer axis, sits within a much older early ecclesiastical site, and the graveyard's earthen bank and external fosse, a shallow ditch running around the outside, are thought to represent an original internal division of that wider religious complex rather than a later addition. Stone walling completes the boundary where the earthen bank does not run. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century headstones stand alongside uninscribed grave-markers, and despite being still in use, much of it has grown over. At the centre, the site of Kilmacoo church occupies what would once have been the focal point of the whole enclosure.

The layers of history here accumulate in unexpected ways. A walled and railed plot on the north side is believed to mark the grave of a landlord named Sankey, who died in England but had expressed a wish to be buried at Bawnmore. The entrance passageway leading south-east to the main road was repaired by Cork County Council in August 1932 and resurfaced using stones taken from a nearby fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stones beside a water source, that had been disturbed in the process. It is a quietly disorienting detail: Bronze Age material pressed into service as road fill for a twentieth-century council repair job. Local tradition, recorded by MacCarthaigh in 1975, holds that drums are heard in the vicinity whenever someone from the locality dies, a belief that gives the site a particular atmospheric weight without requiring any embellishment.