No markers, no inscriptions, no visible indication that this roughly ten-by-twelve-metre plot cut into a south-facing slope was ever set apart for burial at all. It is heavily overgrown, the ground rising steeply on either side, and it looks, to the casual eye, like nothing more than an awkward corner of a field.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, recorded there as a circular area, though what survives on the ground reads as subrectangular in shape. That discrepancy between the mapped outline and the physical remains is common enough with early burial grounds, particularly those that predate the formalisation of parish graveyards under post-Reformation church administration. Many such plots in West Cork are associated with the pre-Christian or early Christian periods, sometimes used for the burial of unbaptised infants, known in Irish tradition as cilliní, small unofficial cemeteries that were kept deliberately apart from consecrated ground. Whether that is the case here is not recorded, but the absence of any grave markers and the site's apparent informality are consistent with that type of use. The steep south-facing slope, overlooking the Atlantic inlet of Barley Cove, would have made it a distinctive and somewhat isolated location, set apart from the working landscape around it.