The site at Tiranascragh is rectangular in plan, roughly eighty metres along its longer axis and sixty across, enclosed by a stone wall about a metre high. It is an ordinary enough piece of ground at first glance, but a closer look at what lies within it, and what is believed to lie beneath it, makes it considerably less so.

The southern end of the enclosure is occupied by the remains of a church, an older presence around which the graveyard grew. Most of the visible headstones date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but a number of uninscribed stone slabs survive in the southern and north-western sectors, unmarked and unattributed, predating the era of carved memorial inscriptions. More sobering still is what local tradition holds about the northern sector: a mass grave associated with the Great Famine of the 1840s, when deaths outpaced the capacity for individual burial and communities interred their dead in shared ground, often without markers of any kind. Such famine graves are scattered across Ireland, frequently identified through oral memory rather than documentary record, the absence of inscription itself a form of testimony to the circumstances in which people died.

The site is reached from the south-south-east, through the surrounding pastureland. The uninscribed slabs in the southern and north-western areas are worth looking for carefully, easy to miss among the more recent headstones. The northern end of the graveyard, level and largely unmarked, is where local knowledge places the famine burial ground.