What makes it quietly legible to anyone who wanders through is the way it preserves its own history in two distinct halves: a western section of modern burials, and an eastern section where the older dead lie beneath plain headstones and flat graveslabs, two of which carry carved Latin crosses.

When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded this place in the nineteenth century, it appeared as an unenclosed and irregularly shaped graveyard, roughly forty-five metres by thirty, sitting open to the surrounding land beside the Joyce River to the southwest. Since then it has been enclosed, regularised into a rectangle, and considerably extended. The eastern portion, with its older nineteenth-century stones, represents what would have been more or less the whole site as the original surveyors found it. The plainer the stone, generally speaking, the older the tradition it belongs to, and the graveslabs here, flat stones laid horizontally over a burial rather than set upright as a marker, follow a form common in rural Irish burial practice well before headstones became the norm.