That absence is itself a kind of fact. Rural graveyards in Clare range from early medieval enclosures associated with forgotten church sites to post-Famine burial grounds that filled quickly and then fell out of use, and Drumline's ground has not yet declared which kind it is.

Clare is a county with an unusually dense scatter of such places, many of them pre-dating the consolidation of Catholic parish burial in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some occupy the circular or oval enclosures that betray early Christian origins, the shape of the boundary doing the talking when all other evidence has gone. Others cluster around the ruins of a nave-and-chancel church or a simple oratory, the graves pressing up close to walls that no longer have a roof. Without more detail specific to Drumline, it is not possible to say which tradition this site belongs to, only that the townland name itself, derived from the Irish Droim, meaning a ridge or elevated strip of land, suggests the kind of local topography that early communities often chose for burial, visible, slightly raised, set apart from the working ground around it.