The medieval parish church that once occupied the centre of this burial ground has left almost no trace above ground. What survives of it instead is scattered, repurposed, and quietly absorbed into the graveyard itself: a sandstone slab with an oval notch near one side, probably once a hinge socket stone from the church door, now standing upright as a gravemarker over a lintelled grave. Nearby, built into the face of an overgrown unnamed tomb, is the decorated head of an ogee window, a narrow, curved stone arch of local red sandstone that most likely dates from the 15th century. The church, in other words, has been gradually dismantled and folded back into the ground it once served.

The church at Garfinny, known in Irish as Teampall na Gairfeanaí, is documented as a 13th-century parish church. A royal visitation in 1615 confirmed that both the church and its chancel were still standing, but by 1756 the building was recorded as a ruin. By August 1841, when the antiquarian John O'Donovan visited and wrote his account for the Ordnance Survey, only the east gable remained upright, standing to roughly 3.66 metres with a pointed sandstone window head still partially preserved. O'Donovan described the gable as set on a green rocky eminence at the centre of a spacious graveyard, the surrounding ground defined not by walls but by the remnants of a stone ditch or fosse. That gable is now gone too; the 1841 account is the last record of any standing fabric. When surveyor Laurence Dunne carried out a detailed graveyard survey in 2010, he found no coherent above-ground remains of the church at all, only those two salvaged architectural fragments and a slightly raised platform area in the interior where a concentration of early graves may mark where the building once stood.

The graveyard sits at around 50 metres above sea level on the lower slopes of the Slieve Mish Mountains, with open views south over Dingle Bay and the Iveragh Peninsula. It is enclosed by a drystone wall capped with flat flagstones and entered through iron gates. The 2010 survey also recorded fourteen previously unrecorded cross-slabs and cross-inscribed stones within the ground, along with a single holed stone inside the medieval burial area. A holed stone is a worked stone with a deliberate perforation, the purpose of which is not always certain but which tends to appear in early ecclesiastical or ceremonial contexts. The graveyard remains in active use as a National Monument.