Many of its grave markers are low, plain, and carry no inscription at all, the kind of stones that mark the presence of the dead without offering any name or date to anchor them in history. Who they commemorate, and from what era, can only be guessed at. The earliest inscribed headstones on the site date to the 1800s, though the uninscribed markers may be considerably older. There are also chest tombs, a form of raised box-like monument popular from the seventeenth century onward, adding a further layer of time to the place.

The graveyard occupies an L-shaped area enclosed by a stone wall to the north-east and south-east, with a stone-faced scarp running along the roadside to the south-west. It was extended to the north-west at some point during the mid twentieth century, a practical expansion that quietly doubled its footprint and gives the site its slightly irregular outline when viewed from above. Within the older portion, the remains of a church survive, though what remains standing or visible of that structure is not clear from surviving accounts. The combination of church ruin and layered burial ground places Dunnycove within a broader pattern of early ecclesiastical sites along the West Cork coastline, many of which were in continuous use from the medieval period well into the modern era. The setting itself seems deliberate: a ridge position with a clear view south-west to the sea, the kind of elevated spot that early communities often chose for their sacred places, perhaps for the visibility, perhaps for something less easy to articulate.