Most burial grounds in Ireland follow the irregular contours of the land or the footprint of whatever church preceded them, but the ground at Knocknalyre in mid Cork has been laid out in something close to a true square, roughly forty-five metres to a side, sitting on the western shoulder of a north-to-south river valley. The slope drops away sharply on the eastern side, giving the place an oddly tilted quality, as though the living and the dead occupy slightly different planes.

The ruin near the eastern end of the enclosure is the former Church of Ireland parish church of Garrycloyne. Church of Ireland rural parish churches of this kind were typically plain, modest structures serving small Protestant communities, and many fell out of use as those congregations dwindled during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The headstones gathered along the southern side of the ruin span a long period, running mostly through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the earliest surviving dated inscription reaching back to 1765. That places the visible memorialisation of this site firmly in the Georgian period, though the church and the land around it are almost certainly older.

The graveyard remains in active use, and a more recent extension has been added on the eastern side, edging out towards the steepest part of the slope. The old and new sections sit together without much ceremony, which is itself quietly telling about the continuity of the place. The ruined church and its cluster of weathered southward-facing stones reward a slow circuit, with the dates and names on the older markers offering a compressed record of the parish's post-Reformation Protestant community.