At Moortown in County Kildare, a graveyard sits on a moderate north-facing slope with an unusual split identity. What appears today as a neatly walled burial ground was once something considerably larger and less defined, its earlier extent traced only by a broken line on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, where it measured roughly 70 metres from north to south and 50 metres from east to west, open and unenclosed.

By the time the revised map was produced in 1939 to 1940, the picture had changed considerably. The northern portion had been fully enclosed, while the southern section was only partially bounded by a bank and carried its own name: Rath Nua. A rath is a type of early medieval earthwork enclosure, typically circular or oval and formed from an earthen bank and ditch, though here the name seems to have been applied to this southern, bank-defined area rather than to a freestanding monument. That southern section may also have contained a church, suggesting this was once a more substantial ecclesiastical site than its current form would indicate. The graveyard as it now stands measures approximately 40 metres east to west and 26 metres north to south, enclosed by a mortared stone wall. The legible grave markers date to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the majority concentrated in the eastern half of the enclosure.