The enclosure predates the burials as a distinct monument, and the dead were laid within a space that had already been set apart, perhaps for centuries, before the first body was interred there. That layering of purpose, one sacred use folded inside another, is what gives the site its particular atmosphere.

The burial ground itself is a roughly rectangular area measuring approximately 18 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, its extent defined by numerous grave markers rather than any enclosing wall of its own. It was already significant enough to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which labels it simply as "Burial Ground", suggesting it was a recognised feature of the local landscape at that time. At the north-eastern edge stands a separate monument entirely, a standing stone, one of the large upright stones erected in prehistoric Ireland whose precise original purpose is rarely recoverable but whose presence here adds another temporal layer to an already complex site. Circular enclosures of this kind in Ireland are often the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, though some enclosures have earlier origins. The decision to place a burial ground within such a space, rather than beside a church, is not unusual in rural Ireland, where old enclosures were sometimes reused as burial sites precisely because they already carried a sense of sanctity or boundary.