What makes it quietly unusual is not its age alone but its combination of elements: a neatly bounded enclosure, modest in scale at roughly fourteen by fifteen metres, enclosed by a low earthen bank no more than half a metre high, and within it a vault of mortared stone that has endured in a landscape where so many comparable structures have long since collapsed or been cleared away.

The vault sits at the northern end of the enclosure, and on top of it rests a slab commemorating Terrence Nowland, dated 1770. A vault of this kind, a stone-built underground or semi-underground chamber used for the interment of the dead, was often associated with families of some local standing, offering a more permanent and protected form of burial than an earth grave. A second slab, this one lying flat on the ground rather than placed atop the vault, carries a date that appears to read 1814, though some uncertainty surrounds that reading. Together the two slabs suggest the site was in active use across at least several decades, and possibly longer, before whatever event or circumstance brought burials there to a close.