It is a small and quietly precise piece of geography, the kind of detail that tends to get absorbed into the landscape without anyone remarking on it.

The graveyard was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the great nineteenth-century mapping projects that documented Ireland's landscape in extraordinary detail, as an enclosed rectangular plot of roughly 45 metres by 30 metres. At some point after that survey was made, the site was extended to the west, nudging beyond its original footprint. The townland of Rinn Na Mara sits in west Galway, in the coastal country near Bearna, and the graveyard's position beside a minor road to a quay gives it the character of a place that served a small, working community rather than any ceremonial centre. Beyond what the early map recorded and the subsequent westward extension, the history of the site remains largely uncharted.