At Lugduff, what appears to be an ordinary enclosure around a burial ground is thought to incorporate the remains of a cashel, a type of early medieval stone ringfort that would originally have enclosed a church and its associated buildings within a roughly circular defensive wall.

The suggestion comes from Ua Riain, writing in 1940, who proposed that the cashel predating the church on this site was not demolished when the graveyard took its modern form but was instead absorbed into the perimeter wall, its ancient stonework quietly repurposed as a boundary. Harold Leask, one of the foremost authorities on Irish ecclesiastical architecture of the mid-twentieth century, also noted the site in his 1950 work on early Irish churches. The implication is that the graveyard wall at Lugduff is not simply a field boundary but a survival, however altered, of an enclosure that once defined a small early Christian settlement.

That kind of continuity is not unusual in Ireland, where early monastic enclosures frequently became the template for later parish graveyards, their circular or oval outlines sometimes still visible in the landscape long after the original purpose was forgotten. At Lugduff, the wall itself becomes the thing worth looking at, less for what it is now than for what it may quietly contain.