What makes the site quietly unusual is its shape: a rectangular enclosure with a D-shaped extension pushed out at the south-western corner, a kind of architectural afterthought that suggests the ground was expanded at some point to accommodate demand, or perhaps to incorporate an older feature of the landscape.

The earliest legible headstones date to the 1810s, but the presence of a ruined church within the enclosure hints at a much longer history of use on this ground. Church ruins of this kind in rural Ireland frequently mark early medieval or medieval ecclesiastical sites, where a small parish or monastic community established a place of worship that later fell out of regular use, leaving only its walls behind while the surrounding graveyard continued to function. The earthen bank defining the enclosure is itself a form of boundary common to early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where a raised perimeter, sometimes called a cashel when built in stone, set sacred ground apart from the surrounding landscape. The graveyard remains in active use today, the new graves pressing up against the older stones on the south-south-west-facing slope, the whole site angled toward the bay below.