Clustered around the ruins of the church at the raised centre of the old burial ground, they are not forgotten monuments so much as monuments to anonymity, stones that were never meant to carry text. Alongside them are at least six cross-slabs, flat incised markers of a type common in early Irish ecclesiastical sites, and the fragmentary walls of a church whose foundations go back to the thirteenth century.

The church at Dunurlin is documented as a parish church from the medieval period, with references in the Calendar of Documents relating to Ireland placing it in the thirteenth century. By the time excavations were carried out in 1991 under Ó Coileáin, the structure had long been a ruin, though the dig produced 110 architectural fragments, most of which remained on site as of a 2010 survey conducted by Laurence Dunne; a number may have been transferred to the Ballyferriter Museum. One fragment that Ó Coileáin had identified as a cusped ogee window head, a decorative late-medieval arch form with an S-curved profile, could not be located during the later survey. The graveyard itself was considerably smaller in 1841, closer to a square shape, and was first enlarged some time between that date and 1896 as the second edition Ordnance Survey map confirms. The boundary wall enclosing the older section was built in the second half of the nineteenth century, constructed in local rubble stone and still largely intact.

The ground within the old burial ground rises noticeably, reaching roughly two metres at the height of the ruined church before dropping away on the western, northern, and eastern sides. The north-eastern corner is overgrown and shows no visible graves, which may indicate it lay outside the graveyard's original limits. Access into the older section runs through the newer graveyard to the south, via a pair of rusted gates between low rubble-stone piers, with a two-step stile immediately to the left as an alternative. Several tombs towards the edges of the old ground are partially obscured by grass, briars, and furze, which gives parts of the interior a quality of slow reclamation that is at odds with the more formal modern grave settings nearby.