At St Fintan's in Sutton South, the townland boundary follows a roughly square line on three sides, but curves noticeably on the western edge. That curve is not an accident of surveying or a quirk of land division. According to the Fingal Historic Graveyards Project, it marks the former outline of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that typically surrounded an early medieval Irish monastic or church site, often predating the Norman period by centuries.

The graveyard itself carries its history in layers, each section named by the date it came into use. The oldest part, referred to locally as the 1189 section, sits directly beside St Fintan's Church and is the core around which everything else has grown. To the east lies the 1907 section, added as the parish's needs expanded, and to the west the 1954 section followed. The most recent addition extends downslope to the west and is known simply as the lawn, a name that comes from its use of flat grave markers set flush with the ground rather than upright headstones, a style that became more common in Irish cemeteries during the latter half of the twentieth century. The graveyard remains active today.

The site is located in Sutton South on the Howth Peninsula in north County Dublin, and the graveyard is associated with St Fintan's Church, which provides the clearest point of orientation for a visitor. The oldest section, pressed up against the church itself, rewards a slow walk. The sequence of expansion from the 1189 section outward through to the lawn section gives a visitor an unusually legible sense of how a community burial ground grows over time, each addition reflecting both population change and shifting taste in commemoration. The western curve in the boundary, easily missed if you are not looking for it, is perhaps the most quietly remarkable detail, a line in the landscape that has outlasted whatever structure it once enclosed.