At Cloghran in County Dublin, the ground around this roughly square burial ground has been cut away so thoroughly that the site now sits isolated on a natural rise, the extraction work having come right up to the boundary itself. Cast-iron railings and hedgerows mark the perimeter, and beyond them the land drops away where stone was once taken out, leaving the graveyard looking oddly preserved, even stranded, amid the altered landscape.

The headstones within span from the eighteenth century through to the early twentieth, and several memorials from the 1700s survive in reasonable condition. The oldest visible marker belongs to Margaret Roe, who died in 1737, making it one of the more legible early examples of its kind in the area. The site was formally surveyed in 1992 by Egan, and the record compiled by Geraldine Stout was later updated by Christine Baker, with the current entry dating from January 2015. That survey work gives the site a degree of documentation that many comparable rural graveyards in Ireland lack, though the physical setting, rather than any single monument, is what gives Cloghran its particular character.

The graveyard lies in Cloghran, a small townland in north County Dublin, not far from the motorway corridor and Dublin Airport, which makes its atmosphere of quiet exposure all the more pronounced. The cast-iron railings that enclose it are worth examining closely; railings of this type were common for boundary enclosures from the nineteenth century onward and often indicate a degree of civic or parish investment in maintaining the site. Visiting in low light or in winter, when hedgerow growth is thinner, gives the clearest sense of how close the quarrying came to the burial ground itself, and how little ground separates the headstones from the edge of what was cut away.