Set on a south-facing slope with a view over the village below, the rectangular burial ground contains something that has nothing to do with Christian burial: a souterrain in its north-western corner. A souterrain is a man-made underground passage or chamber, typically built during the early medieval period, often used for storage or as a refuge. Finding one tucked into the corner of a working graveyard, where headstones from the early nineteenth century onwards stand in ordinary rows, gives the site an odd double life.

The east side of the graveyard holds the remains of a church, itself built on the footprint of an even earlier structure. That layering, one church replaced by another on the same ground, is common enough in Irish ecclesiastical sites, where places of worship tended to accumulate on spots already considered sacred or simply well-established within a community. What the original church looked like, or precisely when it gave way to its successor, the surviving fabric does not readily say. The headstones that remain legible begin in the early 1800s and continue to the present, meaning the graveyard has been in continuous use for at least two centuries, even as the older, stranger features around its edges have quietly persisted.