It runs north to south, measuring roughly 34 metres long, 4 metres wide, and nearly 2 metres deep, and local tradition identifies it simply as "the famine grave". That name alone carries considerable weight in the Irish landscape, where the Great Famine of the 1840s left behind not just death counts but physical marks on the land, many of them still unacknowledged by any formal memorial.

The burial ground itself appears on the 1922 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked as a rectangular enclosure of approximately 50 metres east to west and 36 metres north to south. The site is divided informally by time: the eastern half contains modern graves with conventional headstones, while the western half holds the fosse, a term for a ditch or trench, and something rather more ambiguous. Just to the east of the fosse, a scatter of small, thin headstones are set into the ground, averaging around 20 centimetres high and 30 centimetres wide. They are aligned north to south and closely resemble the markers found in a cillín, the informal term for a children's burial ground, where unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground were quietly interred, often without ceremony or record. Whether these stones predate the famine trench, belong to the same event, or mark an altogether separate tradition of burial is not clear from what survives above ground.

The combination of elements at Ballyclery, the mass linear trench, the small anonymous markers, and the continued use of the site into the present day, gives this otherwise unremarkable roadside ground an unusually layered character. It sits on the south side of an east-west byroad, easy to pass without a second glance, though what lies within it spans at least two distinct and sorrowful chapters of local life.