A handful of headstones lie flat near the south-east corner, three of them re-set upright and close together, the only visible survivors of what was once a more populated site. Local tradition holds that the rest of the headstones were dumped into a nearby lake, which, if true, would place the names and dates of generations of north Cork people somewhere beneath the water.

The graveyard occupies the former demesne of Mitchelstown Castle, and its history is one of gradual erasure. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1842, the site appeared as an oval enclosure, considerably larger than what remains today, measuring roughly fifty metres north to south and forty metres east to west, set within a wooded area. A rectangular structure in its north-west corner was already marked only as a church site, meaning the building had fallen out of use or been cleared before the map was even drawn. Burials continued until the graveyard was formally closed in 1876, and the church itself was demolished sometime before 1900, when the present brick wall was put up, reshaping the enclosure into its current, smaller, roughly square form. The interior was bulldozed around 1949 or 1950, removing much of what remained above ground. In 1982, earthmoving machinery damaged an eighteenth-century burial vault belonging to the Ryder family, according to local account. Then, in April 1998, trench work along the southern perimeter wall uncovered what appeared to be a further vaulted tomb, possibly dating from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a reminder that the ground here likely holds considerably more than the surface now suggests.