That description, by Crawford, still captures something of the quality of the place: approached down a long avenue lined with stone walls, entered through a gateway and stile, it feels set apart from ordinary roads and ordinary time. Four high crosses stand within the enclosure, tall carved stone monuments that in early medieval Ireland typically marked a monastery of some significance, and their presence here signals that this hollow has been a place of religious and communal importance for well over a thousand years.

The graveyard is associated with both a parish church and an early medieval monastery, and the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 were already describing it simply as an old burying ground, implying that even then its origins were obscure. The enclosing stone wall was probably built in the eighteenth century, and the headstones concentrated in the southern half of the site date from that century onwards. The position of the later medieval church within the graveyard remains uncertain; a stone structure survives, but whether it occupies the original footprint is unknown. In 1985, the northern half of the graveyard was levelled by a mechanical digger in preparation for new burials. A preliminary archaeological excavation followed, and what it uncovered changed the plan entirely: a curving stone wall came to light beneath the disturbed ground, thought to be the remains of the ecclesiastical enclosure that once surrounded the early medieval monastery. The decision was taken to relocate the modern burial ground elsewhere rather than continue. A gap in the eastern wall, roughly at the southern end, leads to a holy well lying about twenty-five metres away, another element in a layered religious landscape that accumulated here across many centuries.