At Coolbunnia in County Waterford, a quiet graveyard on a north-west-facing slope contains something worth a second look: the boundary that encloses it is not uniform. The eastern and southern sides are formed by stone-faced earthen banks, the kind of boundary construction more commonly associated with early medieval enclosures than with later churchyards, while the western and northern sides are built in conventional masonry walling. The rectangular enclosure, roughly sixty metres east to west and thirty metres north to south, is itself a kind of layered document, its different boundaries hinting at different phases of use and construction over a long stretch of time.

The site is associated with Faithlegg, the early ecclesiastical and parish church that sits within the enclosure. The Reverend P. Power, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1890 to 1891, recorded it among the ancient ruined churches of County Waterford, placing it in a wider survey of ecclesiastical remains across the county. Early ecclesiastical enclosures in Ireland frequently took the form of roughly oval or rectangular areas bounded by earthen banks, sometimes faced with stone, which served to demarcate sacred ground before dressed masonry became the standard building material for such boundaries. That two sides of the Coolbunnia enclosure retain this older form of construction, while the other two were rebuilt or replaced in stone walling, suggests the site was in active use across several distinct periods, each leaving its own material trace in the perimeter.