Among its recorded monuments is a graveyard that has caught the attention of archaeologists, though the details of what makes it distinctive remain, for now, largely undigested by the public record.

Portumna itself has a well-documented past, shaped most visibly by the Burke family, later the de Burgos, whose influence across Connacht stretched from the medieval period well into the early modern era. The town is perhaps best known for Portumna Castle, a semi-fortified Jacobean house built around 1618, and for the remains of a Dominican friary founded in the thirteenth century. Graveyards in Irish towns often cluster around such foundations, accumulating burials across many centuries, with headstones that shift from roughly incised slabs to more elaborate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century carved monuments. Without more specific detail about this particular site, it is difficult to say whether it belongs to a medieval ecclesiastical enclosure, a post-Reformation parish burial ground, or something older still. What is clear is that it has been judged significant enough to merit a formal archaeological record.