Ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and strokes cut along a central stemline, and it appears on hundreds of stones across Ireland and Britain, most of them standing monuments. Finding it on a burial slab would be unusual enough; the trouble is that the stone was removed before anyone could confirm the reading, and it has not been relocated since. That unresolved question sits quietly alongside a cluster of other anomalies at the site: a rough stone cross, small stone slabs carved with a hole through the centre, notched stones of uncertain purpose, and the faint outline of what appears to be an earlier, probably circular ecclesiastical enclosure traceable just outside the graveyard's north-western wall.

The graveyard at Cill Chuáin, the Irish name meaning the church of Cuán, lies directly south of Kilquane village, about 8.7 kilometres north-west of Dingle, at the foot of the western slopes of Brandon Peak. Mt. Brandon, the highest peak on the Dingle Peninsula, rises immediately to the east. No structural remains of the medieval parish church survive above ground, though its site is recorded within the graveyard boundary. What does survive is a layered accumulation of burial practice across many centuries. The historic section of the graveyard is sub-rectangular in plan, enclosed by drystone and mortared rubblestone walls, and entered by a pair of traditional flagstone stiles in which large flat stones project from both faces of the wall to form steps. A 2011 survey by Ann Frykler and Robert Hanbidge of Headland Archaeology Ltd. catalogued some 38 unnamed gravemarkers in the northern area alone, most of them simple upright pieces of locally sourced stone. The oldest dated burial they identified, recorded as Grave No. 8, carries a date of 1921. Two small sub-square stones with holes carved through their centres were also recorded, their original function unclear. A bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface and typically associated with early Christian activity, lies in the fields to the north-west, outside the graveyard proper but within the footprint of the wider ecclesiastical enclosure.