What sets it apart is the sheer density of history compressed into a single walled enclosure: a ruined early church at its centre, a holy well to the south, headstones going back to the nineteenth century, and, discovered beneath the ground in the 1960s, a souterrain, the kind of dry-stone underground passage typically associated with early medieval settlement and used variously for storage or refuge.

The ruins in the centre belong to Kilmocomogne church, a name that preserves a reference to an otherwise obscure early Irish saint. The rectangular enclosure itself, bounded by a stone wall, follows the form of many early ecclesiastical sites across Munster, where the boundary, or cashel, defined sacred ground as much as it provided physical separation from the surrounding landscape. The holy well to the south adds another layer; holy wells in Ireland frequently predate Christianity in their veneration and were often absorbed into the cult of a local saint, becoming sites of pattern days and informal pilgrimage. The souterrain, uncovered during the 1960s, suggests that the site's significance extends back well before any of the standing or ruined structures, into an early medieval or even earlier period of use. A modern extension to the west acknowledges that the community around Lisheen has continued to bury its dead here, layering the contemporary onto the ancient without much ceremony about the distinction.