What makes it worth a second thought is its continuity: headstones here date back to the 1750s, and burials continue to the present day, making it a rare kind of place where the oldest and the most recent dead share the same rectangular ground without interruption.

The graveyard is attached to a Church of Ireland church built in 1743, and its roughly defined boundaries, approximately ninety metres east to west and forty-five metres north to south, suggest a space that was laid out with some deliberateness from the beginning. The Church of Ireland, the established Protestant church in Ireland until disestablishment in 1869, built and maintained many such parish churches and their associated graveyards across the country during the eighteenth century. The earliest surviving headstones at Ardbrack appear within a decade or so of the church's construction, which points to a community that was marking its dead in stone from a relatively early stage, a practice that was not universal at the time.