It is a small anomaly in a graveyard that otherwise follows the familiar rhythms of rural Cork, yet it points to the layered and sometimes contradictory history that accumulates quietly in places like this.

The graveyard is roughly triangular, running about eighty metres east to west and sixty metres north to south, and it contains the ruins of the Church of Ireland parish church of Aghada. That ruin itself sits on or very near the site of an earlier parish church, suggesting that this ground has been set aside for the dead across several distinct religious and cultural eras. The earliest dateable headstone inscription goes back to 1711, and the Irish-language inscription was noted by the scholar Power in 1940. A survey by Coleman and Healy conducted between 1901 and 1903 recorded the many nineteenth and twentieth century headstones that fill out the rest of the site. The graveyard remains in occasional use today, and a more recent extension has been added to the west.

The Irish-language headstone is worth looking for specifically. In a Church of Ireland graveyard of this period, such an inscription is unusual; the two traditions, linguistic and denominational, did not often meet in the same carved stone. Whether it reflects the background of the deceased, the wishes of the family, or simply the hand of a particular mason is not recorded, but it sits as a quiet curiosity among the more conventional memorial stones around it.