The site sits on a south-facing slope in Ballyheen Middle, its outline now so subtle that the most reliable markers are two blackthorn trees standing roughly ten metres to the south, which local tradition holds as indicators of where the dead lie. The field carries an older name too: locals have long called it "The Keel", a word with roots in the Irish word for a narrow church or cell, suggesting that something sacred was here long before anyone thought to map it.

The Ordnance Survey captured the site in its 1842 six-inch mapping as a roughly square enclosure, approximately twenty-five metres across in each direction, marked by a dotted boundary line. By the time the surveyors returned for the 1905 and 1937 editions, the shape had shifted in the record to a circle of about twenty metres in diameter, now labelled simply "Disused". A church once stood just to the north of the burial ground's centre, and writing in 1934, a local researcher named Bowman noted that about one sixth of the surrounding fence was still visible at that time. The ground holds a more violent history beneath its quiet surface. According to the same account, some of those killed at the Battle of Knocknanuss in 1647 were buried here. That engagement, fought a short distance away, was one of the bloodiest of the Confederate Ireland period, ending in a decisive Parliamentarian victory under Lord Inchiquin. Many of the skeletons later uncovered at Ballyheen Middle were reinterred at Buttevant Abbey, a Franciscan friary a few miles to the south whose own ruins still stand along the Awbeg river.