Ecclesiastical enclosures of early medieval origin rarely conformed to tidy rectangles; their curved or angled boundaries often preserve the outline of a much older sacred precinct, one that predates any of the structures that would later occupy the ground within. Here, the enclosure surrounding the graveyard has been identified as extensive, suggesting this was once a site of some significance in the early Irish church, even if nothing dramatic marks it out today.

The graveyard itself is overgrown but still occasionally used, measuring roughly fifty metres east to west and sixty metres north to south. Henchion, writing in 1989, recorded thirty-one inscribed headstones, the oldest dating from 1766. The parish church of Cullen once stood here, and it was evidently functioning as late as the early seventeenth century; Brady's records note it was in repair in both 1615 and 1639. By 1837, Samuel Lewis was already describing only ruins. A new Church of Ireland building was erected immediately to the north-east of the old church and consecrated under the name of Christ Church in 1849, but that too has since collapsed to a low mound of rubble, leaving no visible surface trace of either structure. A small rectangular feature to the south of the graveyard, measuring six metres by two metres and marked on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, may be the remains of a watch house, the kind of small structure erected in the early nineteenth century to deter body-snatchers from disturbing fresh graves.

The layering here is worth pausing over: an early ecclesiastical enclosure, a medieval parish church, a Victorian replacement, and a graveyard still quietly receiving the dead, all occupying the same worn ground in a corner of north Cork.