The vaults are the detail that catches the eye. Above-ground burial structures of this kind were typically built for families of some local standing, a way of marking social distinction that persisted in rural Ireland well into the 1800s, even as the surrounding headstones record the more modest burials of ordinary parishioners laid out in the same ground.

The rectangular enclosure at Ballycurrany follows a pattern common across Munster, where older burial sites were delineated by a low or substantial stone wall, sometimes following the outline of an earlier ecclesiastical enclosure, sometimes simply marking the agreed boundary of consecrated ground. The nineteenth-century grave-markers here place the site firmly within a period of considerable upheaval in Irish rural life, spanning the decades that led up to and followed the Famine of the 1840s. Many such burial grounds in Cork accumulated the bulk of their visible memorials during this era, as modest cut-stone markers became more affordable and families increasingly chose to record names and dates in lasting form.