These were the rounds, a form of devotional circumambulation common at Irish sacred sites, in which a prescribed circuit is walked, often barefoot, with prayers said at fixed stopping points. At Nohaval, the circuit took in three priests' graves and a tomb said to contain the original altar-stone of the early church that once stood within this same enclosure. On the 13th, the day of St Finian, the ritual moved on to a holy well further north. The continuity implied by that sequence, Christian graves, a pre-medieval altar-stone, a saint's well, and a fixed calendar date, hints at layers of religious practice folded together over many centuries.

The graveyard itself sits on the east side of a road and forms part of a wider early ecclesiastical complex. It is rectangular, running roughly 95 metres east to west and 35 metres north to south, and once contained the parish church of Nohavaldaly. The graveyard's current footprint is larger than its older one: the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 shows the burial ground confined to the eastern half of the present area, but by the 1904 edition it had expanded westward to the road and northward into an adjacent field. That northern extension was identified by its distinctly uneven surface, the ground being more irregular there than elsewhere in the same field, a physical irregularity that likely reflects earlier subsurface features, disturbed earth, or earlier burial activity. About 55 metres to the north stood a round tower, the tall, tapering stone towers built at Irish monastic sites from roughly the ninth century onward, used variously as bell towers, landmarks, and places of refuge. Its presence confirms that Nohaval was once a site of some ecclesiastical significance, even if little of that early fabric is now visible above ground.