The eastern boundary of the graveyard is not a wall or a railing but the cliff edge itself, with iron railings enclosing the other three sides. The ground holds numerous low, uninscribed grave markers, the kind of simple stones that record a burial without committing a name to the record. When the local antiquarian Coleman visited in the early twentieth century, he counted only half a dozen inscribed memorials across the entire site, the earliest of them dating to 1789.

The ruins of a church sit near the eastern end of the plot, close to where the ground drops away, suggesting the burial ground grew up around an older place of worship rather than being established independently. This pattern, a small rural church gradually abandoned while the adjoining ground continued to receive the dead, is common across Cork and the wider south of Ireland, though few examples enjoy quite so exposed a position. The graveyard measures roughly seventy metres east to west, narrowing from about forty metres at the harbour-facing end to around twenty-five metres at the western side, giving it the tapered outline that becomes legible only when you look at it from above. Despite its age and the weathered anonymity of most of its stones, the site remains in occasional use.