The headstones visible today are all modern, and the oldest feature that survives inside the enclosing cement wall is a grave surround, probably eighteenth or nineteenth century in date. There is a well within the graveyard too, in its north-east quadrant, though nothing about it suggests it was ever treated as sacred. For a place carrying the name of Columbkille, the sixth-century monk who founded monasteries across Ireland and Scotland and gave his name to countless holy sites, the absence of early physical evidence is quietly striking.

The graveyard was recorded on the 1899 re-survey of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a roughly rectangular enclosure, approximately fifty metres on its longer axis, with a later rectangular extension opening off the southern half of the western wall. The association with a church is documented in sources going back to Hardiman in 1846 and repeated by O'Flanagan in 1927 and Killanin in 1947, but whatever stood here has long since left no surface trace. What the landscape does preserve is a cluster of related features along the shoreline to the south-west: a natural boulder known as Mullán Cholmcille, or St Columbkille's Boat, and two tidal holy wells lying roughly 160 metres and 255 metres away respectively. Tidal holy wells, which are submerged at high water and only accessible during certain states of the tide, have a particular place in Irish devotional geography, their intermittent visibility lending them an air of significance that ordinary springs rarely carry. Together these features suggest a local cult focused on Columbkille that extended well beyond the graveyard boundary and down to the water's edge.