These are reputedly fragments of an altar raised in honour of a Fitzmaurice lady interred somewhere beneath the ground nearby. The inscriptions have no obvious straightforward translation, which only adds to the oddness of encountering them in what is otherwise an unremarkable rural burial ground. More striking still is what is entirely absent from the site: the church itself, which once stood here, has completely vanished.

The place takes its name from Cill Tóime, meaning the church of Tóime, and its origins reach back to 580 AD, when a man named Domaingein is recorded as having founded a church on the site. The building that eventually replaced whatever early structure he raised was constructed in 1623, a date known from a commemorative plaque that was set into the southern wall near its south-east corner and was recorded by the antiquarian John O'Donovan in 1841. By the time later observers came looking, neither the plaque nor the church could be found. The explanation, recorded in 1942, is unsentimental: the church was demolished and its stones recycled to extend the surrounding cemetery wall. It had been built of small stones, measuring fifty-eight feet in length and twenty-one feet in breadth, with walls two feet and three inches thick. All of that material now forms the boundary that encloses the graves, the church quietly converted into its own monument.