A large vault open to the south stands along the roadside to the north-west of the burial ground, and its Latin inscription, dated 1700, is a piece of self-composed epitaph: Dr Dyonisius O'Mahony, who describes himself as "an unworthy presbyter", records that he built the monument for himself and for those who would follow him in the same vocation. It is an unusual thing, a man organising his own memorial with such deliberate humility, and it gives the place an atmosphere distinct from the ordinary graveyard.

Fr. Dyonisius O'Mahony was the founder of the hermitage that stands nearby on Holy Island, a place of early Christian association on the lake at Gougane Barra. The graveyard itself is a small, enclosed space, bounded to the east and south by a stone wall and to the north and west by a stone-faced scarp, a cut or raised bank faced with stone to hold the slope. In the western half, rows of low uninscribed grave markers sit quietly in the ground, without names or dates. The inscribed headstones are all twentieth century in date, and among them is a memorial by the sculptor Seamus Murphy for two figures known as the Tailor and Ansty. Tim Buckley, the tailor in question, and his wife Anastasia were a Gougane Barra couple who became the subjects of Eric Cross's 1942 book "The Tailor and Ansty", a work that was banned in Ireland for over a decade. Murphy, one of the foremost stone-carvers of twentieth-century Ireland, made their memorial a fitting counterpart to the older, self-authored monument along the roadside verge.