The burial ground at Kilmacough, near Knockarigg, measures just twenty metres by fifteen, yet the Ordnance Survey Name Book for Ballynure parish saw fit to label it a "very ancient grave yard", a phrase that implies a history stretching well beyond the handful of nineteenth-century stones now visible within it. The gap between what survives above ground and what that phrase gestures towards is the quietly unsettling thing about the place.

The most legible point of reference is a tombstone belonging to the late James Wall Esquire of Knockrigg, dated 1791. Wall's stone appears to be the oldest recorded monument on the site, and the Ordnance Survey Name Book, a systematic parish-by-parish record compiled by the Survey's teams in the nineteenth century, noted it specifically, suggesting it was already considered a marker of some significance. The designation "very ancient" in that same source implies the ground was in use long before Wall's burial, though no earlier monuments are recorded. Whether the site has pre-Christian or early medieval origins, as such a description might hint at, is not established by what survives.