Roughly rectangular and measuring approximately 70 metres by 56 metres, it sits where a steeply sloping valley side meets the broad plateau to the south, with extensive views opening out in every direction. A small stream runs along its south-eastern boundary before making its way roughly 900 metres north-east to join the Nore. What makes the site unusual is not the graveyard itself so much as the cluster of structures within and around it: the remains of a medieval church sit in the north-east quadrant, alongside what is thought to have been a residential tower, a combination that suggests this was once a more substantial complex than bare ruins now imply.

The townland name gives a sense of how long this place has been known and described. Its Irish form, Druim Deilgneach, translates as the Thorny Ridge or Hillock, and the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839 recorded it in those terms, noting a large burying ground, a fragment of church wall, a portion of castle wall abutting the ruin at its east end, and the remnants of a court or yard wall to the south. By 1839 the graveyard and its associated ruins already had the quality of a place being observed rather than actively managed. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, described it as a large and much frequented graveyard taking in the top and south and west sides of the hill on which the church stood, which suggests continued use well into the nineteenth century and beyond. The visible headstones bear this out, dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Between the 1839 Ordnance Survey mapping and a revision carried out in 1946 to 1947, the picture shifted: the graveyard came to occupy only the south-eastern portion of the enclosing field, with a quarry cutting across the northern part, a reminder that even consecrated landscapes are not immune to the practical demands of the land around them.