The question at issue was straightforward enough: which of two distinct features, a low earthen scarp or the subcircular tree-lined fence running a couple of metres beyond it, actually marked the limits of the churchyard? The answer, apparently, was unclear even to those living alongside it. That ambiguity has quietly persisted ever since.

The raised, roughly pentagonal area measures around forty metres east to west and thirty metres north to south, its edges defined by a scarp standing only about half a metre high. Within the scarp, to the north, stand the ruins of the late-medieval parish church of Macloneigh, a place of worship that once served this part of mid Cork before falling into its current state of quiet collapse. A bullaun stone, one of those hollowed boulders found across early medieval Irish sites and often associated with ritual or devotional use, has been relocated to the southern interior of the fenced enclosure, suggesting the site drew significance from a period well before the medieval church was built. The earliest inscribed headstone recorded here dates to 1782, though the many low, uninscribed gravemarkers scattered across the ground suggest that burials considerably older than that are present, simply unmarked in any legible way. The most recent recorded burial dates to 1985, meaning this is not a place frozen at some fixed historical moment but one that continued to receive the dead into living memory.

The site is reached by crossing a field from a road to the west. The elevated position means the Lee River is visible to the north, giving the hillock a quietly commanding aspect over the surrounding low pasture.