The churchyard at Coole in County Cork occupies a roughly rectangular plot, approximately forty metres east to west and sixty metres north to south, enclosed by a stone-faced earthen bank, and it has been accommodating the dead of the surrounding area since at least the 1780s, the date of the earliest inscribed headstones noted there.

The ruined parish church of Coole stands more or less centrally within the enclosure, and the older, uneven, overgrown section of the burial ground clusters to the south of it, where the ground is irregular and the headstones lean at various angles. This contrast between the older southern portion and the rest of the site reflects a pattern of gradual change: more recently, the ground to the north and west of the church was levelled by machine and a new entrance was inserted from the road to the northeast. Such interventions are not unusual in active graveyards, but they do alter the feel of a place considerably, smoothing away the undulations that tend to accumulate over centuries of burial. The site sits on the west side of the road, looking down toward a separate ruined church roughly 150 metres to the south-southeast, a detail that hints at a longer and more layered ecclesiastical history in this part of Cork than the tidy modern entrance might suggest.