The earliest Ordnance Survey mapping recorded it as a D-shaped, unenclosed plot, roughly 25 metres by 15 metres, open to the land around it. Today it is rectangular and walled, and its correct Irish name, Ulta Beaga, is rarely used. The interior is heavily overgrown, the graves clustered towards the western end as though the living space of the dead has gradually contracted.

The graveyard sits near a stream that also marks a townland boundary, with the valley floor spreading around it. According to the cartographer and writer Tim Robinson, it was originally a cillin, or children's burial ground, a CBG in the shorthand of field archaeology. Cillíní were informal, unconsecrated plots where unbaptised infants were traditionally interred, often at liminal spots in the landscape, boundaries, shorelines, old ringfort sites, places considered to lie outside the fully Christian world. Over time, Ulta Beaga seems to have acquired a broader role; the earliest legible gravestone dates to 1848, and a walled Joyce family plot occupies the north-west corner, enclosed by both stone and hedge. The Joyces were one of the dominant families of the Connemara uplands for centuries, and their separate enclosure within an already small graveyard suggests the kind of local social hierarchy that quietly shapes even the most modest burial ground.

The shift in plan from D-shaped to rectangular, documented between the first Ordnance Survey edition and more recent observation, points to gradual reshaping by the community that used it. Whether the original curve followed some earlier boundary, a field edge or a path long since gone, is not recorded. What remains is a walled enclosure in rough grass, a stream nearby, and a cluster of stones at the western end marking names and dates that begin just a few years after the Great Famine.