The site remains in occasional use, meaning it occupies that particular Irish category of place that is neither fully active nor fully historical, somewhere between the living and the archaeological.

The graveyard measures roughly sixty metres east to west and thirty-five metres north to south, and just north of its centre stand the fragmentary ruins of Knockavilly parish church, a remnant that gives the broader site its ecclesiastical identity. The headstones that can be read date largely from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the earliest inscribed example noted from 1795. The most quietly remarkable detail, however, comes from a 1939 account by Hartnett, who recorded that rounds were paid at the grave of a Reverend Patrick Murphy, who died in 1845. Paying rounds, or performing a pattern, is a devotional practice in which a person walks a prescribed circuit around a sacred site or grave, often reciting prayers at set stations along the way. It is a custom more commonly associated with holy wells and pilgrimage sites, so its recorded performance at the grave of a specific named clergyman gives this otherwise modest hilltop graveyard an unexpected layer of local religious significance.