Look more carefully, however, and the ground reveals a kind of layered disorder: architectural fragments of a medieval church lie scattered throughout the site, but the outline of the nave itself has been effectively swallowed by the density of post-1700 grave memorials concentrated in the western section. The building that once stood here has become, in a very physical sense, illegible.

The graveyard occupies a sub-rectangular plot measuring roughly 23.7 metres north to south and 35.8 metres east to west, enclosed by a rubble stone wall built after 1700. In the north-east corner stand the ruins of a chancel, the altar end of what would have been a medieval church, while Caherelly Castle sits approximately 300 metres to the west, placing this site within a cluster of historically connected monuments. Inside the enclosure, a small gabled mortuary house in the south-east corner, measuring around 5.5 by 6 metres, actually pre-dates the surrounding wall, suggesting it was already here when the formal graveyard boundary was established. The north-west quadrant is occupied by a 19th-century vaulted tomb belonging to the Wilkinson family. Vaulted tombs of this kind, built with brick or stone arching over the burial chamber, were a fashionable form of family monument among the more prosperous classes of 19th-century Ireland. The earliest dateable gravestone recorded on the site is from 1795, marking a Ryan burial on the south side, and interments continued well into the 21st century, with McElligott family burials recorded in 2003 and 2005.

The original entrance in the centre of the east wall has been badly damaged and shifted to the north side, so arrival at the site requires a small recalibration of expectation. A newer graveyard immediately to the south has been in use since the mid-1990s, and the contrast between the two enclosures is quietly instructive: the older ground is crowded and palimpsestic, its history compressed underfoot, while the newer one is open and ordered. For anyone interested in the archaeology of ecclesiastical sites, the scattered stonework throughout the older graveyard rewards slow attention, even if the full extent of the original church plan can no longer be traced.