The site is a rath, a type of circular enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period, built up from earthen banks and originally used as a defended farmstead. Rather than falling into ruin or being ploughed away, this particular rath found a second life as a burial ground, its level interior offering ground that communities have chosen to use for interment across generations.

The graveyard was already established enough by 1838 to be marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of that year, and it appears again on the 1920 revision, suggesting continuous use across at least a century of cartographic record. The majority of the visible graves appear to date from the twentieth century, with the highest concentration gathered in the western half of the interior. Over time the burial ground has spread beyond the boundaries of the original earthwork, extending outward to the west and south as the need for space grew.

What makes the arrangement quietly arresting is the layering of it: an Iron Age or early medieval enclosure, built to shelter the living, now sheltering the dead, with headstones occupying ground that would once have held a farmhouse and its yard. The rath itself is recorded as a separate monument, and the graveyard sits within and around it, each element belonging to a different era but occupying the same small patch of Mayo ground.