The northern half holds the remains of a Church of Ireland building, its walls still legible in the landscape, while the southern half contains not only the graves of the more recent dead but also the site of an earlier church, now entirely gone at ground level. Two ecclesiastical structures, one ruined and one vanished, sharing the same enclosed ground with the living tradition of burial that has continued around them.

The headstones in the southern half, some cut from slate, date from the early nineteenth century through to the present day, which places the graveyard within a long post-Reformation tradition of Church of Ireland use in rural West Cork. Slate was a practical local choice for funerary carving, durable in the wet Atlantic climate and available from quarries across the region. The presence of a church site beneath or alongside the later graves suggests the ground was considered significant well before the standing ruins were built, a pattern common across Ireland where sacred enclosures accumulated layers of use across the centuries. The rectangular enclosing wall, itself a characteristic feature of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, gives the whole place its coherent form even as the structures within it have fallen or disappeared at different rates.