Most burial grounds conform to a roughly rectangular or oval plan, following the logic of enclosure, but the one on the western shore of the Castle Haven estuary in Co. Cork bends around something older than itself. That older thing is the remains of Glenbarahane Church, the ruined structure around which the ground was shaped and the walls were built, and which continues to anchor the site even in its fragmentary state.

The graveyard is enclosed by a stone wall and sits close to the water's edge, with the estuary immediately to its east. The earliest legible headstones date to the early nineteenth century, though the presence of a medieval church ruin within the boundary suggests the ground has been used for burial considerably longer than the surviving monuments indicate. In the south-west corner there is a large vaulted tomb, the kind of substantial masonry structure that signals family wealth and a desire for permanence, and elsewhere across the site there are a number of chest tombs, which are box-shaped above-ground monuments that were popular among prosperous families from the seventeenth century onward. The combination of these monument types with the older ecclesiastical remains gives the graveyard an unusual layered quality, with different centuries of local life compressed into a compact, irregular space.

The site is accessible from the western shore of the Castle Haven estuary, and the L-shaped plan becomes apparent once inside the enclosure, where the church ruins help explain why the boundary wall takes the course it does. The vaulted tomb in the south-west corner is worth seeking out, and the chest tombs scattered through the ground reward a slow look for inscriptions, though the oldest of these may have weathered significantly.