That irregular outline is not merely a surveyor's curiosity. It hints at the layered history compressed into a relatively small plot of ground, where at least three distinct phases of religious and funerary use have left their marks, some visible, some almost entirely erased.

The most recent of those phases is also the most thoroughly vanished. A Church of Ireland parish church once stood against the northern boundary of the graveyard, built in 1811 and described by Samuel Lewis in 1837 as a small, neat building with a tower and spire. It was repaired and re-roofed in 1827, but by around 1879 it had been taken down, and today there is no visible surface trace of it at all. The headstones that remain are old enough to predate even that church: a stone recorded by Buckley in the early twentieth century carries a date of 1751, and others noted in survey work go back to 1770. Older still, the slight rise at the centre of the graveyard is thought to indicate where the medieval parish church of Monanimy once stood. That earlier structure left no upstanding remains, only the gentle swell of the ground beneath which its foundations presumably still lie. About sixty metres to the west, Monanimy Castle adds another layer to what is a remarkably concentrated stretch of historical ground along this quiet stretch of the Blackwater valley.