The one at Kilbolane in north Cork is triangular, an unusual form that immediately suggests the enclosure predates the kind of orderly land division that came later. The boundary itself is an earthen bank with an external fosse, a defensive ditch running around the perimeter, though this particular fosse has since been deepened and widened for agricultural drainage, blurring the original profile somewhat. The whole thing sits in level pasture, quiet and unassuming, measuring roughly 70 metres along its longest axis.

The site has a long ecclesiastical history behind it. A parish church dedicated at Kilbolane was significant enough to appear in the Papal Taxation lists of 1291, a survey of church revenues compiled for Rome that provides one of the earliest documentary records of many Irish parishes. That medieval church is long gone, but at the centre of the graveyard stand the remains of its Church of Ireland successor, a later parish church that itself fell out of use. The headstones that survive are more modest in age, dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the oldest recorded stone bearing the date 1720, as noted by the local antiquarian Grove White in the early twentieth century. Seven centuries separate the first documentary mention of this place from the most recent legible grave marker, a quiet accumulation of time compressed into a triangular field in County Cork.