The graves do not occupy a churchyard, a monastic enclosure, or any of the settings one would usually associate with Christian burial. Instead, they lie within the north-western quadrant of a rath, a type of circular or oval earthen enclosure built in the early medieval period, typically as a defended farmstead. The dead here were placed inside what had once been domestic space.

The area set aside for burial is roughly D-shaped, measuring about 20.5 metres north to south and 9 metres east to west. On its western side it is bounded by the original bank of the rath itself, while to the east the boundary follows the line of a possible souterrain, an underground passage or chamber, also of early medieval origin, that was often dug beneath or beside a rath for storage or refuge. Throughout the interior, small limestone slabs have been set into the ground marking individual graves, each oriented east to west in the manner conventional for Christian burial, where the body lies facing the rising sun in anticipation of resurrection. The combination of elements is quietly layered: a pre-Norman enclosure, a subterranean feature of uncertain date and purpose, and a series of modest grave markers that speak to a community burying its dead by older landmarks long after those landmarks had lost their original function.

What Brackloon preserves, in its compact and unassuming way, is the tendency of Irish communities across many centuries to reuse earlier earthworks as burial places, treating the visible past as a practical and perhaps spiritually charged resource rather than something to be cleared away.