At Ballylusk in County Wexford, a burial ground appears clearly on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, associated with the ruins of an early church. Yet when the site is examined more closely, there is no evidence of actual burial around the cairn of the church itself, even though the whole complex sits within a defined ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular boundary that typically marks out an early Christian religious site.

The site occupies a slight rise in an otherwise low-lying stretch of countryside, with a stream running north to south just to the east. This kind of topography is characteristic of early medieval church foundations in Ireland, where a modest elevation and a nearby water source were practical considerations as much as spiritual ones. The ecclesiastical enclosure at Ballylusk contains the church remains alongside what is recorded as a cairn, a mound of stones that may represent the collapsed fabric of the building or something older still. What the nineteenth-century cartographers understood to be a functioning or at least legible graveyard does not appear, on closer inspection, to have left the physical traces one would normally associate with a burial ground of that kind.