The distinction is quiet rather than proclaimed. The enclosure sits above the surrounding laneway by up to two metres along its western edge, swelled upward by centuries of burials, and its interior is so densely packed that the standing walls of the old medieval church have become, in effect, a retaining structure, holding back the accumulated depth of graves that now fill almost to the full height of the surviving masonry.

A parish church was recorded here by the end of the thirteenth century, but by 1615 a Royal Visitation found the vicarage of Dunquin described as 'waste voyde', and by 1756 the church was already noted as being in ruins. What remains is a rubble-built rectangular structure, and its presence in this graveyard is less that of a ruin held apart for inspection than of something absorbed back into the landscape of burial around it. The font from that medieval church was removed and is now housed in the modern church at Dunquin, built around 1857. A survey carried out by Laurence Dunne in 2010 recorded four cross-slabs within the graveyard, more than had previously been formally noted. Two are rough stone crosses long recognised in earlier surveys. A third, partially exposed and tilted at an angle, is an anthropomorphic cross, meaning it has a form that faintly suggests a human figure, cut from local green siltstone. A fourth is a small rectangular sandstone piece incised with an equal-armed cross whose lines reach to the full edges of the stone. Thirty-six unnamed headstones of unhewn local sandstone were also recorded, along with twelve grass-covered lintelled graves, a type where flat stones are laid horizontally across the burial, many of them partially collapsed and concealed beneath dense grass and briars.

The graveyard is still in use, though a newer burial ground has been opened in the townland of Ballyickeen, about two kilometres to the south. Access is through a galvanised gate between squared piers of local sandstone, and the interior path is uneven and not easily walked in places. The outer edges of the enclosure are dense with fuchsia and other vegetation that has largely been left unmanaged, giving the whole site a quality of being slowly reclaimed, even as new graves continue to be added to it.