The graveyard at Ballynadrumny sits on the level crest of a partially dug-away esker, one of the long, winding ridges of gravel and sand deposited across the Irish midlands by glacial meltwater during the last ice age. The ground beneath the dead, in other words, is itself a remnant of a much older process, and much of it has already been removed. What remains is an unusually shaped enclosure, roughly D-shaped, around 58 metres across east to west, with a notably straight eastern side running about 48 metres. A modern mortared stone wall marks the boundary, and burials continue here still, with the earliest legible markers dating from the eighteenth century.

At the centre of the enclosure stands a church ruin, and it is inside this structure that the site's more quietly arresting details are preserved. Two inscribed slabs survive there, one dating to the sixteenth century and another possibly from the seventeenth. A third slab, also from the sixteenth century, was recorded by Fitzgerald between 1899 and 1902, noted in the graveyard itself rather than the church, but it has not been located since. Whether it was removed, buried, or simply lost to the gradual churn of a working burial ground is not known. Inscribed slabs of this period typically carry commemorative texts in Latin or Irish, sometimes naming the deceased and the craftsman, and their presence here points to a community with both the resources and the inclination to mark its dead in lasting stone several centuries before the earliest surviving headstones.