The graveyard itself is subrectangular, roughly 60 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, enclosed by a stone wall, and its edges were pushed southward around 1840 to make room for a newly built Church of Ireland structure. The result is a layered site where medieval rubble and nineteenth-century dressed stonework occupy the same ground.

The ruined building at the centre is the old parish church of Ballymartle, a medieval foundation whose precise origins are not well documented but whose continued presence as a ruin within a working graveyard gives some sense of how long this ground has been in use. The inscribed headstones here go back to the 1770s, though many older, low, uninscribed grave markers suggest burials that predate any formal recording. The Church of Ireland church that occasioned the southward extension was built between 1837 and 1842, a low-gabled rectangular building with plain buttresses on its north and south walls. In the 1870s it was modified further, gaining a vestry and lobby at the west end and a four-sided apse, a polygonal or semi-enclosed projection housing the altar end, attached to the east gable. Both the newer church and the graveyard remain in use today, meaning the site operates as a functioning place of worship and burial while also containing the fragmentary remains of its own predecessor.