They are medieval in origin, and they sit quietly within an enclosure that most visitors would take to be an ordinary nineteenth-century churchyard.

The graveyard occupies the southern side of the road running through the village of Dungarvan, positioned roughly at the centre of what was once a medieval settlement. A motte, the earthen mound that formed the base of an early Norman fortification, lies about a hundred metres to the west-southwest, and the remains of a castle sit some fifty metres to the northeast. The church that originally anchored this complex has long since disappeared above ground, though a Church of Ireland building was erected on its footprint in 1811. The present sub-rectangular enclosure, measuring roughly forty metres east to west and widening from about forty-three metres on the west side to fifty-five metres on the east, is likely contemporary with that early nineteenth-century rebuilding. The medieval graveyard almost certainly extended further than the current boundary suggests. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan noted the unusual uninscribed slabs and described surviving carved stonework of considerable age. Also present within the graveyard are an effigial tomb, in which a carved figure represents the deceased, a head-slab graveslab, a type common in medieval Irish burial practice where the stone narrows to mark where the head lay, and a tapering graveslab of similar antiquity.

The site sits in plain view along the village road, and the medieval stonework is visible within the enclosure. The coffin-shaped slabs with their carved heads are the details worth looking for slowly.