That detail alone signals something worth paying attention to: a site where different centuries have been layered on top of one another with a kind of practical indifference, each generation making use of what was already there rather than starting fresh.

The graveyard at Kellymount sits at the eastern end of a low ridge overlooking a steep river valley. A Church of Ireland church, built in the nineteenth century, was constructed directly on top of and incorporating an earlier medieval church, so the newer building contains the bones of the older one. The graveyard wall enclosing the large rectangular site, measuring roughly 34 metres north to south and 75 metres east to west, is also nineteenth-century work. Inside it, however, something older survives: a low bank running inside the line of the upstanding wall in the south-western quadrant suggests the outline of an even earlier graveyard enclosure, its edges softened to a gentle rise of ground. About twenty metres west of the church's western gable, a medieval grave-slab lies in the western quadrant of the yard, a single marker from a period that predates all the datable memorials nearby, which are uniformly eighteenth and nineteenth century in date. An early medieval church and its own associated graveyard stand just 85 metres to the east, suggesting this whole stretch of ridgeline was significant well before any of the surviving stonework was laid. Freneystown Castle, positioned on high ground some 545 metres to the south-east, would have been visible from here across that same valley.

For anyone visiting, the graveyard repays slow attention to ground level rather than the headstones. The low rise in the south-western corner, easy to overlook, is where the ghost of an earlier boundary persists, and the incorporated holy well in the southern wall is easy to miss if you are not specifically looking for it along the base of the stonework.