Set on a ridge above the east-facing coastline of west Cork, the site is enclosed by a stone-faced earthen bank, a simple but deliberate boundary that separates the living ground from the elevated dead. Inside, rows of low headstones stand largely uninscribed, their identities worn away or perhaps never carved at all, leaving whole sections of the graveyard as a kind of silent archive.

The earliest legible inscriptions here date to the 1760s, which gives some sense of when the community began marking its dead in a way that has survived. Among the more architecturally specific features are two chest tombs to the east of the ruined church, the chest tomb being a raised, box-like monument popular among families of some means from the seventeenth century onwards. To the west of the church stand six gabled tombs, their pitched-roof forms echoing the architecture of small houses or chapels in miniature. Most unusual is a pyramidal grave marker in the south-west quadrant, a shape that appears only occasionally in Irish burial grounds and tends to draw a second look. The graveyard is still in occasional use, which means it has never fully passed into the category of ruin or relic.