Bullaun stones are boulders with one or more cup-shaped hollows, commonly associated with early Christian sites and sometimes used for grinding or ritual purposes. The site tapers as it runs southward, stretching nearly 95 metres from north to south but narrowing from 46 metres at the northern end to just 21 at the south. The result is less a tidy churchyard and more a layered early medieval complex that continued accumulating centuries of use.

The monastery at Killamery was founded, according to the historian Carrigan writing in 1905, by St. Gobán Fionn in the early seventh century. His feast day falls on the 6th of December. The site is not merely a matter of local tradition: the Annals of the Four Masters, the great seventeenth-century chronicle of Irish history, records the death of an abbot named Domhnall, son of Niall, in 1004. The two hillocks within the graveyard divide the material remains between them in a way that reflects their different periods of use. The medieval church and the later ruined Church of Ireland building sit on the southern hillock alongside a cross-slab, while the northern hillock holds the high cross, another cross-slab, the stone cross, the bullaun stones, and most of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century headstones.

Entry to the graveyard is through a stile and gate at the southern end of the eastern wall. The straight line of the northern wall may actually cut across the original extent of the medieval burial ground; the slope of the northern hillock continues outward for roughly 13 metres beyond the present boundary, following a curving scarp that suggests an earlier, more generous perimeter. The first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1839 shows a pathway running from the southern side of the village and entering the graveyard at the north-east corner, a route now effectively severed by the current enclosure wall.