Whether that emptiness reflects an area never used for marked burial, or one where older stones have simply vanished, is not recorded. It gives the site an uneven, slightly unsettled character: one portion thick with memorials, another conspicuously bare.

At the centre of the enclosure stand the ruins of the parish church of Derryvillane, surrounded by an irregular stone wall that measures roughly sixty metres across in both directions. The area immediately east, north, and west of the church is now choked with dense overgrowth, which is also where most of the grave markers are concentrated, making that portion of the site largely inaccessible. The visible burials lie to the south of the church and date mostly from the nineteenth century. Among them is a canopy tomb from 1883, a style of monument in which a stone ledger or chest tomb is sheltered beneath a raised architectural hood or canopy, common in Irish churchyards of the Victorian period. The earliest legible headstone on the site, recorded just south of the church, is dated 1780.

The graveyard is reached from a road approximately seventy metres to the east, entered through a stile in the eastern wall. Visitors should expect that the more historically layered portion of the site, around and behind the church ruin, will be difficult to explore without some effort to push through heavy vegetation.