That proportion alone marks this out as an unusually well-preserved record of eighteenth-century mortality and memorial culture in east Cork, a period when carved headstones were far from a given for rural communities. The oldest surviving stone is dated 1735, and the graveyard as a whole sits within a neat rectangular enclosure of approximately 55 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, its perimeter defined by a stone wall and softened by a tree-lined boundary.

At the centre of the graveyard stands the ruined Church of Ireland parish church of Gortroe, a shell that gives the site an additional layer of history. The presence of a burial vault in the north-east corner, constructed in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, suggests that at least one local family of some means wished to mark their dead in a more architectural way than a headstone alone could manage. Burial vaults of this kind were typically above or partially below ground stone chambers, built to receive the remains of landowners or clergy who sought a degree of separation, literal and social, from the surrounding graves. Researchers O Buachalla and Henchion documented the headstone count in 1966, giving the site a reasonably detailed early record at a time when many comparable graveyards in rural Ireland had yet to receive any formal attention.