The cartographers who surveyed the area in the mid-nineteenth century marked it not as a burial ground in active use, or even as a ruin, but as a site of one, the parenthetical qualifier doing quiet work to signal that whatever had once occupied that roughly fifty-metre circle was, by then, already gone or undetectable.

The circular form is itself worth noting. Enclosed burial grounds of roughly circular plan are a recurring feature of the early medieval Irish landscape, often associated with early Christian communities and sometimes preserving the outline of even older enclosures. The boundary, whether originally a bank, a wall, or a ditch, would have defined a consecrated interior from the ordinary ground outside it. At Moyeightragh, no trace of that boundary survives above ground today. The site exists now almost entirely as a cartographic memory, a name and a dotted line on a sheet of paper produced nearly two centuries ago.