Several large stones standing among the graves were not cut for that purpose at all; they are drainage stones, originally part of a parapet, repurposed by whoever was to hand when markers were needed. Whether they came from the medieval church at the centre of the graveyard or from Drangan Castle, which sits roughly 160 metres to the north-north-east, is an open question. Either way, the reuse speaks to a practical ingenuity that is easy to overlook when you are simply reading names and dates.

The graveyard itself sits on a natural platform on a north-facing slope, enclosing the medieval church of Drangan within a roughly coursed limestone wall measuring approximately 60 metres north to south and 46 metres east to west. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century, described it as a large graveyard still very much in use, and it appears the present enclosing wall dates from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Inside, a subtly raised sub-rectangular area extending north, east, and south of the church seems to mark an earlier, smaller limit of the burial ground, a ghost outline of what came before. Two graveslabs dateable to the sixteenth or seventeenth century are associated with the site; one lies immediately north of the east end of the church's south wall, while the other has not been located. Excavation along the eastern boundary in 1996 by Pollock added another layer of complexity, uncovering an older wall base beneath the present one and establishing that the north-east corner of the graveyard was built over what had once been an infilled post-medieval quarry. The headstones that can be read date from the late eighteenth century onwards, but the ground beneath them has been arranged, disturbed, and reorranged across several centuries.