What makes it quietly arresting is the nature of its headstones: most are low and entirely uninscribed, anonymous markers that give no name, no date, no indication of who lies beneath. It is the kind of place that raises more questions than it answers.

The graveyard is enclosed to the south by a stone wall and to the north by the ruined church itself, whose surviving fabric frames the space and gives it a sense of enclosure despite the open estuary landscape around it. Abbeymahon was a Cistercian abbey, a monastic house of the order that arrived in Ireland during the twelfth century and established communities across the country, often in low-lying, well-watered ground of exactly the kind found here along the estuary shore. The plain, uninscribed stones that dominate the graveyard would not be out of keeping with Cistercian ideas about simplicity and the equality of the dead, though the practice of marking graves modestly, or not at all, was also widespread in rural Ireland for practical and economic reasons. Inside the church ruin, however, a different register survives: a number of inscribed headstones from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, placed by families who continued to use the site for burial long after the medieval community had gone.

The graveyard is described as occasionally used, which means it retains a quiet, active quality rather than the pure archaeological stillness of a fully abandoned site. Access is by a stile from the roadway to the south, crossing into the pasture that surrounds it.