That date, recorded by the historian Power in 1923, marks only the earliest legible stone; the site itself is considerably older, having developed on the location of an ancient parish church, the kind of pre-Norman foundation that repeatedly anchored Christian communities in the Irish countryside long before any present-day structure was raised.

The Church of Ireland church that now stands to the north-east of the graveyard's centre was built on this same ancient parish site, a pattern common throughout Ireland where successive religious buildings layered themselves onto the same consecrated ground over generations. The graveyard measures roughly 65 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and around 55 metres across, a modest but not insignificant enclosure. Most of the readable headstones belong to the late eighteenth century, which gives the site a particular character: the carved lettering and decorative motifs of that period, vernacular yet often accomplished, tend to reflect local stonemason traditions that varied considerably from one Cork parish to the next. The ground is recorded as being in occasional use, meaning it retains an active, if infrequent, connection to the surrounding community rather than having passed entirely into the status of a heritage curiosity.