The area is best known for Cong Abbey, the Augustinian monastery founded in the twelfth century, and the village's graveyard carries that monastic inheritance quietly, functioning as a place of burial that stretches across centuries of local and ecclesiastical history. Graveyards attached to or associated with early Irish monasteries often served the surrounding community long after the religious community itself dissolved, accumulating headstones, family plots, and carved markers from widely different periods in a single, compressed space.

Cong's monastic foundation has roots that predate the Anglo-Norman period. The abbey as it stands in partial ruin today was established around 1120 by Toirdelbach Ua Conchobair, High King of Connacht, and later developed under his son Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, the last High King of Ireland, who retired there and died at the abbey in 1198. That association with Ruaidrí gives the site an unusual position in Irish history, marking it as the final refuge of a man who had negotiated the Treaty of Windsor with Henry II in 1175. A graveyard in such proximity to a foundation of that age would have received the remains of clergy, local nobility, and ordinary parishioners alike, its ground accumulating significance simply through continuous use over many generations.