The peculiarity here is that by 1839, when officers compiling the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded the practice, nobody could say who that saint actually was. The day was kept, the people came, and the name, if there ever was one, had simply been forgotten.

The graveyard sits on a north-east facing slope among rough grazing land, where bedrock breaks through the surface in places. It is associated with the church at Coolaghmore, a structure with origins across multiple periods of use. The graveyard itself has an irregular shape, running roughly 75 metres north to south along its eastern edge and tapering to about 37 metres at the west, with a spread of around 64 metres east to west. Before 1839 it appears to have had no formal enclosure at all; the first-edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map shows it marked with a dashed line, the cartographic convention for an unenclosed site. The stone wall that now defines the space, with its entrance gate at the south-east angle, came later. Within and just outside the boundary, three graveslabs of note have been recorded: two coffin-shaped slabs dating to the 13th or 14th century, documented by Carrigan in 1905, and a third found roughly seven metres south of the church. Coffin-shaped graveslabs of this type, carved to echo the outline of the body within, were a common memorial form in medieval Ireland, though relatively few survive intact above ground. The majority of the graveyard's headstones cluster to the south of the church, with a smaller number lying to the north.