At Taghsheenod Glebe in County Longford, that process left something unusual behind: the ghost of a much earlier enclosure, still legible inside the boundaries of the newer one, its earthen banks and external fosse quietly persisting beneath later burials and stone walling. A fosse, in this context, is a defensive or boundary ditch, and the one here is best preserved along the north and east sides of the earlier ground, where it remains visibly distinct from the surrounding landscape.

The older graveyard was associated with a medieval church, the south wall of which once formed part of the enclosure's southern boundary. When the site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, the graveyard appeared as a kidney-shaped enclosure measuring roughly 55 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south. At some point in the second half of the nineteenth century or the early twentieth, this compact, irregular space was absorbed into a far larger, rectangular graveyard, nearly 70 metres along its longest axis, defined by a stone wall. The older boundary, built from earth and stone with its accompanying fosse, was not demolished but simply enclosed within the new perimeter, and it survives today as a low bank visible to anyone who knows to look. A gap in the bank on the north side may indicate where the original entrance once stood. Most of the memorials within the site, dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, are concentrated in that older, inner area rather than spread evenly across the expanded ground.

The layering here is what makes the site worth attention. Standing inside the larger graveyard, the earlier enclosure reads as a subtle change in the ground, a raised bank curving away from the flat regularity of the later additions. It is the kind of detail that rewards a slow, unhurried walk around the perimeter of the inner area, particularly along the north-east arc where the fosse is most evident.