The ground drops away to the south, which means the dead here have, in a manner of speaking, one of the more commanding aspects in West Cork. The site is enclosed by a stone-faced earthen bank, roughly rectangular in plan, and within it the headstones arrange themselves in rows, some plain and uninscribed, others carrying legible inscriptions that date back to the 1780s. That mixture of the marked and the anonymous is quietly telling: families who could afford a carved stone did so, while others went into the ground with nothing more than a rough upright slab to mark their place.

The graveyard at Kilgarriff also contains the remains of an earlier church, the kind of roofless shell that appears throughout rural Ireland wherever a medieval or early modern parish foundation gradually fell out of use. These church ruins, reduced in many cases to low courses of wall or a partial gable, are often the oldest surviving structure in their townland, and Kilgarriff is no exception to that pattern. The inscribed headstones from the 1780s suggest the burial ground was still in active use well into the late eighteenth century, even as the church fabric itself deteriorated. The enclosing bank, faced with stone on its outer side, is the kind of boundary that marks a consecrated or long-established burial precinct, distinguishing it from the surrounding landscape with deliberate formality.