Fragments of the medieval church that once stood here have been pulled from the ruins and pressed into service as grave markers, their carved or dressed edges still visible where they break the soil. It is an improvised continuity, the dead commemorated by pieces of the very building that once served the living community around them.

The site sits on a low rise in undulating, mountainous terrain, within sight of Barnane tower house and roughly 610 metres from Barnane House to the north-west. The graveyard is rectangular, running about 30 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, enclosed by a 19th-century stone wall with an entrance gate and stile set slightly off-centre in the southern wall. The poorly preserved ruins of a medieval church occupy the northern quadrant. Immediately outside the boundary wall runs a shallow, narrow fosse, a defensive or demarcating ditch of post-medieval date, which traces the full perimeter. Ordnance Survey mapping tells a quiet story of expansion: the 1840 six-inch edition shows the north wall of the medieval church itself forming the northern boundary of the graveyard, but by the revised 25-inch edition of 1901 the enclosing wall had been pushed further north, absorbing more ground. The eastern end of the graveyard belongs to a different world entirely. A stone wall running south from the south-east angle of the medieval church divides the space, separating the Carden family burial ground from the rest of the cemetery. The Cardens of Barnane House are interred in a private vault here, entered through a gateway in the centre of the eastern wall, a physical expression of the social distance that gentry families often maintained even in death.