Among its inscribed headstones and chest tombs are a number of Huguenot burials, the graves of Protestant refugees who fled France following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and settled in some numbers along the river valleys of Cork and Waterford. That their presence is still legible in the stonework of a small Cork graveyard is one of those small, precise reminders of how far religious persecution once scattered people across Europe.

The wall enclosing the graveyard was built in 1753, and the earliest inscribed stones date from around the same mid-eighteenth century period. At the centre of the rectangular enclosure, roughly sixty metres along its longer axis, stand the ruins of a Church of Ireland church. That building itself is thought to occupy the site of a much older parish church of Innishannon, which would place Christian use of the ground considerably further back than the Georgian stonework suggests. The Huguenot connection to Innishannon has drawn the attention of local historians since at least the late nineteenth century, with researchers including Alcock and, later, St. Leger documenting the burials in some detail during the 1990s.