The roughly trapezoidal enclosure, running about a hundred metres east to west and fifty metres north to south, is still in active use, its newer headstones sharing ground with the ruins of a medieval parish church at its eastern end and a penitential station at its western end. A penitential station is a fixed point, often a stone or cross, where pilgrims perform prescribed prayers as part of a formal devotional circuit; here, both features form part of the Pilgrimage of St Gobnait, a tradition of considerable age associated with one of Ireland's lesser-known but locally venerated female saints.

Gobnait is the presiding figure of Ballyvourney, a sixth-century abbess whose cult has survived in this corner of mid-Cork with unusual continuity. The ruined parish church near the graveyard's eastern end is dedicated to her, and the landscape around the village retains the texture of long-established devotion. Adding a different layer to the site is the former Church of Ireland parish church that stands along the northern edge of the graveyard. A small, rectangular neo-Gothic building with an embattled, or battlemented, tower at its western end, it was built in 1824. The juxtaposition is quietly telling: an ancient Catholic pilgrimage site, its medieval ruins still legible in the ground, and a nineteenth-century Protestant church constructed in a medieval revival style, all occupying the same enclosure on a hillside above the same village.