That absence is itself a kind of statement about how much of rural Ireland's funerary landscape remains incompletely documented.

Burial grounds of this type, recorded as discrete monuments rather than as active or Church-affiliated cemeteries, often turn out to be early medieval in origin, occasionally associated with a nearby ecclesiastical site, a holy well, or the remains of a small settlement. Some are simple enclosures, their boundaries marked by an earthen bank or a ring of older stonework. Others preserve grave slabs, bullaun stones, or the foundations of a small mortuary chapel. Ballyliddan is a townland in Clare, a county whose limestone landscape holds a considerable density of such sites, many of them quietly present in fields and along field margins without any formal interpretation on the ground.