Built from mortared stone, it almost certainly incorporates dressed masonry salvaged from a medieval parish church that once stood a short distance away. The church was dismantled in the 1830s, its fabric repurposed to form the boundary that now holds the graveyard together, a practical act of recycling that quietly erased one structure while preserving another.

The church site itself lies around 30 metres to the south-east of the graveyard, and the two together occupy a larger ecclesiastical enclosure set into the ridge of Knockatemple. The church was functioning as a parish church during the later medieval period, and by the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1840, the burial ground was already well established, marked on the six-inch map with a dashed outline. By 1916, the current quadrilateral enclosure had taken its definitive form and was recorded accordingly. The dressed stone spotted in the graveyard wall by researcher L. Swan in the 1980s is likely all that remains visible of the medieval building, absorbed now into the boundary rather than standing apart from it.

The graveyard itself is compact, measuring roughly 55 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and 27 metres across. The ground drops sharply toward the south, so the headstones, most of them from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cluster on the higher interior ground. Access is through a gate and stile at the northern perimeter. The ridge setting means the site looks out over open country to the south and west, with higher ground rising behind it to the north.