That a functioning burial ground continues to receive the dead around an ancient subterranean structure is the quiet strangeness of Dunbulloge. The graveyard sits on the west side of the road, a large rectangular plot measuring roughly 120 metres east to west and 80 metres north to south, and the inscribed headstones visible above ground date back to the 1780s, though the ground itself has been in use far longer.

The ruins of the old parish church of Dunbullogue occupy the same enclosure, and by the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1842, the graveyard was already a well-established feature of the landscape. Since then, it has been extended to the south and west, meaning the site visitors see today is considerably larger than what the Victorian surveyors recorded. The layering here is typical of Irish ecclesiastical sites, where early medieval activity, medieval parish organisation, post-Reformation decline, and continued community burial use accumulate within a single boundary, each era leaving something behind.