The medieval church of Kildrum, Teampall Chill Dromann, was already a ruin by the early nineteenth century, and unusually, not a single architectural fragment of it survives anywhere in the graveyard. Normally, stones from a collapsed church find a second life as burial markers or tomb edging; here, they were apparently taken away piecemeal by mourners in a hurry, until nothing coherent remained above ground. By August 1841, when the scholar John O'Donovan visited, he could only record that the church site was pointed out to him by locals.

The graveyard appears in the Papal Taxation List of 1302 to 1307 for the diocese of Ardfert, placing the parish firmly in the medieval ecclesiastical landscape of Kerry. Its original shape, a nearly circular unenclosed oval noted on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1841, was gradually altered; by 1896 two boundary walls had squared it off and extended it. Within the old section, seventeen unhewn white quartz stones clustered near cross-slabs and holed stones may indicate that part of the ground was used as a ceallúragh, the Irish term for an informal burial place for unbaptised children, set apart from the main consecrated area. Two red sandstone grave slabs laid side by side commemorate Rowland Rice, who died on 20th April 1737, and his son Rowland Junior, who died in 1750. Both slabs carry the IHS monogram at the top and, less commonly for Kerry, encircled skull and crossbones at the base. Buried here too is Father Herbert, known in Irish as An Brathair Rebárdach, a friar who travelled the district during the Penal Laws disguised as a wool buyer in order to administer the sacraments. A later grave belongs to John Curran, a national teacher from Ventry who lived from 1852 to 1935, recorded on his headstone as archaeologist and patriot. Curran was an authority on ogham, the early medieval script carved in notches along the edges of standing stones, and he corresponded with leading scholars of his generation including R.A.S. Macalister. His daughter Agnes, a Cumann na mBan member who died in 1932, is buried in the same family grave.

The notched headstones scattered across the interior are easy to miss beneath the grass. These are among the most ancient grave markers still found in Irish burial grounds, their notch or cross-cut at the top representing the simplest possible reduction of a cross form to stone. The density of these markers, and the concentration of unnamed stones, follows the outline of the original oval enclosure rather than the later extended boundary, quietly mapping a space that the walls no longer describe.