It is one of those quietly telling details that accumulates meaning the longer you look at it: a working graveyard, still receiving the dead, where the older markers have lost their footing and been moved aside, piled together in the shadow of a building that itself stopped functioning as a church long before anyone now buried here was born.

The graveyard is trapezoidal in shape, roughly 35 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, enclosed by a low earthen bank with a hedge growing along its top. You enter from the north through a gate with piers and a stile. The ruin at the centre is the former parish church of Leitrim, a place of worship that served this part of north Cork and whose walls now stand open to the sky. The earliest inscribed headstone recorded here dates to 1779, though some low, uninscribed grave markers suggest that burial on this ground may go back further still, to a time when a worked stone with lettering was not the only, or even the expected, way of marking the dead. The pattern of burial across the site is itself suggestive: only the headstones to the north of the church are of recent date, meaning the ground to the south and east carries the older layers of the community's dead.

The entrance off the road to the south is straightforward enough, and the stile and gate mark the way in clearly. Once inside, it is worth pausing near the east gable of the church, where the displaced stones rest against the masonry, some face-out and legible, others turned or tilted. The uninscribed markers scattered elsewhere across the ground are easy to miss underfoot, low and worn as they are, but they are among the more thought-provoking things here.