Two of the earliest, however, are anything but ordinary. They belong to a pair of noted Gaelic scholars whose work placed them among the more significant literary and ecclesiastical figures of their era, and whose graves now rest quietly in a rectangular enclosure of stone-faced earthen bank, approached along a pathway through pasture.

The two men are Rev. Cornelius O'Brien, who died in 1720, and Liam Ruadh Mac Coitir, who died in 1738. Mac Coitir, whose name translates roughly as Red William MacCotter, was a poet working in the classical Gaelic tradition at a time when that tradition was under severe pressure following the collapse of the old Gaelic order. O'Brien, a clergyman, was similarly connected to the scholarly culture that persisted in Cork despite the upheavals of the preceding century. That both men ended up in the same modest rural graveyard in east Cork gives the place a certain quiet gravity. O Buachalla and Henchion, writing in 1963, were among the first to draw attention to the significance of their presence here. Near the western end of the graveyard stand the ruins of the medieval parish church of Britway, and lying on the ground outside its western gable are broken fragments of three plain sandstone troughs, their original purpose now uncertain but their presence adding another layer to a site that has clearly served its community across many centuries.