The graveyard at Cooliney, in north Cork, is triangular, a shape that gives the whole enclosure an air of quiet irregularity. It measures roughly forty metres north to south and sixty metres east to west, bounded on one side by a stone wall and on the others by earthen banks. At its centre sit the ruins of the old parish church of Cooliney, around which the dead of several centuries have been laid in varying degrees of formality, from inscribed headstones to low, unmarked stones that record nothing but a presence.

The site has been in occasional use across a long span, and the visible memorials range across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The older material is more arresting. Inside the church ruin lies a cross-inscribed graveslab to one Thomas Dore, dated 1633 and bearing both Latin and English inscriptions, a combination that reflects the bilingual conventions of early seventeenth-century memorial culture in Ireland. Outside the south wall of the church, the cover of a chest tomb, the flat lidded stone set over a box-like monument, is dated 1678. Both pieces were noted by Grove White in his survey of Cork monuments, published across the years 1905 to 1925, and by an earlier anonymous account from the late nineteenth century, suggesting the site has attracted the attention of local antiquarians for well over a century.

The graveyard is reached by a short avenue from the road to the east. The uninscribed markers scattered among the named headstones are worth pausing over; their anonymity is not unusual in Irish burial grounds of this period, where cost, custom, or the loss of folk memory meant that many graves were marked only by a plain stone set into the ground.