The roofless shell of the old parish church of Ballyhooly has absorbed graves within its own walls, so that the boundary between building and burial ground has long since dissolved. It is an arrangement that feels less like neglect than like a slow, organic accumulation, the living continuing to inter their dead wherever space permitted, regardless of what the walls were originally meant to contain.

The graveyard itself is irregular in shape, stretching roughly fifty metres east to west and around twenty-eight metres north to south. It sits on the south side of the road, pressed up against the eastern edge of Ballyhooly Castle's grounds, with a stone wall and concrete gate piers marking the roadside boundary to the northeast, and a sharp drop down to the river valley forming its southern limit. The ruin of the parish church defines the western and northern edges, meaning the building is not so much adjacent to the graveyard as embedded in it. The site is still in occasional use, and headstones crowd the interior. The earliest recorded inscription dates to 1755, noted by the local historian James Grove White in his multi-volume survey of County Cork published between 1905 and 1925, though the church itself is considerably older.

The proximity of castle, church ruin, and active burial ground within such a compressed space gives the site an unusual layered quality. Visitors approaching from the road will find the gate piers straightforward enough, but the southward drop towards the river valley means the ground inside falls away sharply, and the headstones tilting at various angles across the slope reinforce the sense of a place that has been accumulating, quietly and without much ceremony, for a very long time.