Most burial grounds in Ireland grew up around a church, or at least around the memory of one. The ground at Kilcreggane is different. Tucked onto the western slope of a south-to-north valley, on a gradient steep enough to make the footing uncertain, it holds nineteenth- and twentieth-century headstones within a subrectangular enclosure of roughly sixty metres by fifty, defined by a stone-faced earthen bank. There is no ruined nave here, no trace of a chancel wall, no local tradition that a church ever stood within or near the boundary. The place simply exists as a burial ground, and apparently always has, without the ecclesiastical scaffolding that usually explains such sites.

The enclosure was already old enough to be mapped by 1840, when it appeared, plainly labelled, on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch series. What draws additional curiosity is a cross that was once associated with the site or its community. Fragments of it, decorated with the coat of arms of the Leonard family, were recorded at Tinvane House in County Tipperary by Killanin and Duignan in their 1962 guide to Irish monuments. The Leonards were a landed family whose heraldic presence on a carved cross fragment suggests a degree of local consequence, though the connection between the family, the cross, and the Kilcreggane ground itself is not fully clear. The fragments have since been lost to view entirely, their present location unknown, which leaves the cross as something of an unresolved footnote to the site's history.