Local tradition holds that this is where victims of the Great Famine were buried, without markers, without names. It is an absence that speaks louder than almost anything else in the enclosure, and it sits uneasily alongside the dated and inscribed stones clustered around the ruined church at the centre of the site.

The graveyard at Knockkelly occupies a roughly rectangular plot, measuring about 51.5 metres east to west and 35.7 metres north to south, enclosed by a stone wall between 1.1 and 1.4 metres high. A gate in the eastern wall, with a stile on either side, provides access from the public road. The church stands at the centre, and the headstones, many of them gathered on slightly elevated ground around its walls, span the 18th to the 20th century, with a small number of more recent burials, the latest recorded dating to 2010. The oldest identified stone is set against the internal western gable of the church and carries a date of 1756. The setting itself is dense with older layers: a holy well dedicated to St James lies roughly 180 metres to the north, two large ringforts, which are circular enclosures typically associated with early medieval settlement, sit to the north-northeast and south-southeast respectively, and Knockkelly Castle is visible on a hill about 1.6 kilometres to the southwest. The graveyard sits on a gentle westward-facing slope, with a farmyard immediately to the north, and pastureland stretching around it.

The unmarked eastern section is easy to overlook if you enter through the gate and move directly toward the church ruins. It is worth pausing there first, in what is, by any measure, the quietest corner of an already quiet place.