What makes the site quietly arresting is what sits at its centre: the fragmentary ruins of the old Clonpriest parish church, a structure now reduced to scattered stonework surrounded by the headstones of later generations.

The oldest legible headstones here date from the 1730s, placing the graveyard firmly in the early eighteenth century as a recorded burial ground, though the parish church at its heart is almost certainly older. Clonpriest, whose name in Irish suggests an ecclesiastical foundation, the element "clon" or "cluain" typically denoting a monastic meadow or plain, would have served the surrounding rural community for centuries before the church fell out of use and into its present ruinous condition. The graveyard has been extended to the north in more recent times, a modest expansion that signals a place still quietly functional rather than entirely given over to history.

The site sits on the south side of the road with the Womanagh estuary visible beyond, which gives the ground a particular quality of light and openness that many inland graveyards lack. The ruined church at the centre is fragmentary enough that no architectural detail is noted in surviving records, but the juxtaposition of roofless medieval stonework and eighteenth and nineteenth-century headstones is a characteristic feature of Irish burial grounds where continuous use has layered one era directly onto another.