When the Ordnance Survey teams were moving through the Irish countryside in 1838, gathering place-names and local knowledge for their mapping project, their letters recorded this spot with a phrase that speaks volumes in its brevity: "an old unfrequented burying place." No congregation still tending it, no community still claiming it, just a burial ground that had quietly slipped out of living memory while the surveyors were still within living memory themselves.

The Ordnance Survey Letters of the 1830s were more than a cartographic exercise. The teams were instructed to record antiquities, folklore, and local historical detail alongside the topographical work, and their observations, later compiled and published by Michael O'Flanagan in 1928, preserve a snapshot of the Irish landscape at a moment just before the Famine reshaped it almost beyond recognition. The single line about Tonygarrow is typical of the kind of marginal note that might easily be lost; a burial ground with no named founder, no associated church ruins mentioned, no patron saint attached to it, and no record of when it fell out of use. That kind of anonymity is itself historically suggestive, pointing perhaps to a pre-parish, pre-institutional form of burial practice, the sort of small local ground that served a townland community before the consolidation of Catholic parish infrastructure in the post-Penal era.