What makes it immediately distinctive is its shape: burial grounds that follow a clearly circular plan often occupy sites with much older origins, their rounded boundaries sometimes indicating a prehistoric enclosure or an early medieval ecclesiastical enclosure that was repurposed, generation after generation, as a place to bury the dead.

The site is defined by numerous grave markers, though most have left little trace of the individuals beneath them. One headstone survives with its inscription legible: it records Honoria O Sullivan, who died on the 9th of July 1815, aged three months. That particular combination, an infant's name, a precise date, and an age counted in months rather than years, speaks to the careful grief of parents who wanted something permanent set down, even for a life so brief. The O Sullivan name is deeply rooted in West Cork, one of the great Gaelic families of the region, and a child buried here in the early nineteenth century would have been laid to rest during a period when such informal or older burial grounds were still in active use, particularly for unbaptised infants or in communities with limited access to parish churchyards. Grounds of this kind are sometimes called cillíní, informal burial sites historically associated with infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, though not every circular rural burial site fits neatly into that category.