The masonry walls that define its unusual shape enclose the first Roman Catholic church of St. Mary, a building that takes up so much of the available ground that only a scattering of nineteenth and twentieth-century headstones fit around it. The site is compact to the point of feeling crowded, though not merely with the dead.

Beneath and around St. Mary's lies something older. Cloone was the location of a medieval parish church, and the ground here has held religious significance across multiple eras of Irish Christianity. More striking still is the presence of a transom from a high cross, now displayed within the graveyard. High crosses are among the most recognisable products of early Irish monasticism, typically elaborately carved stone crosses associated with important ecclesiastical sites; a transom is the horizontal arm of such a cross. That this fragment survives and is kept here, rather than removed to a museum, gives the graveyard an archaeological intimacy that a more formally managed site might lack. Three distinct layers of religious life, medieval parish, post-Reformation Catholic congregation, and early Christian carved stonework, occupy a plot no bigger than a modest garden.