It sits in a landscape where early Christian settlement, later plantation, and the particular hardships of nineteenth-century rural Connacht have all left their mark, and old burial grounds in this part of Galway often carry layers of use stretching back centuries, with headstones in Irish and English standing close together, and the unmarked mounds of the very poor pressed in among them.

Moyard itself is a small townland in the parish of Ballynakill, a coastal district whose history runs from early monastic activity through the upheavals of the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements and on into the famine years, when graveyards across Connemara received far more than their ordinary share. Burial grounds of this type frequently began as the churchyard of a medieval parish church, the building itself long since reduced to a few courses of stone or gone entirely, leaving only the enclosure and the graves as evidence of continuous use across many generations.