The rest, over 1,091 surveyed in total, are marked by nothing more than a plain stone or a rough slab with a carved cross, and a significant number may have been missed entirely beneath the fern and tall grass that covers much of the ground. For a working graveyard attached to a parish church, that ratio of named to unnamed is striking. It suggests not obscurity but poverty, or at least the particular kind of poverty that left generations of people buried without the means, or perhaps the expectation, of a legible memorial.

The site sits on the lower south-eastern slopes of Coad mountain, overlooking Cove Harbour and Kenmare Bay, and takes its ecclesiastical identity from Kilcrohane Church, also known as Coad Church, dedicated to St Cróchán, the patron of the parish. The graveyard itself is sub-rectangular, enclosed entirely by a mortared rubble stone wall, and entered only through a pair of white-painted wrought-iron gates in the south-west corner. The ground inside is sharply uneven, broken by a steep drop that divides it into an upper and lower platform; the section around that break was left unsurveyed in 2009 due to the risk of ground collapse. On the upper platform stand the ruins of the church and a separate chapel ruin to its south-west. A local tradition holds that the present church was built over an earlier one, and a window or doorway belonging to that older structure is said to survive on the north side. The oldest identifiable grave belongs to Professor Owen Moriarty, erected by the Moriarty family. Moriarty had been working at the Irish College in Paris and died in 1810 at the age of 95; his headstone also records that he served afterwards as parish priest and vicar for many years. A small stile improvised into the north-west corner of the boundary wall leads out of the graveyard to the shrine of St Cróchán and Toberavilla holy well, a holy well being a spring or water source with long-standing devotional associations, often predating formal Christianity in a given area. The connection between the well, the shrine, and the burial ground gives the whole enclosure a layered quality, each element quietly referencing something older than itself.