The Mountnugent graveyard in County Kilkenny occupies a slight terrace on the eastern slopes of a small stream valley, measuring roughly 53 metres north to south and 63 metres east to west. What makes the site quietly remarkable is not any single feature but the layering: the dead lie above an earlier church that has entirely vanished from ground level, while a motte, the raised earthen mound characteristic of early Anglo-Norman fortification, looms immediately above them.

The holy well to the south-west, the submerged church beneath the graveyard, and the motte overhead together suggest a site that was significant long before its recorded memorials begin. Those memorials, noted by the historian Carrigan in his 1905 county history, date from 1715 onwards, placing the visible commemorative tradition firmly in the eighteenth century. But the most arresting object associated with the graveyard is a stone cross bearing a carved crucifixion, thought to date from the late medieval period or the early seventeenth century. Such crosses, sometimes found re-used or displaced within later burial grounds, are survivals from a devotional culture that the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did much to interrupt or scatter. The fact that this one was found within the graveyard, rather than in situ as part of an intact structure, leaves something of its original context open to question.