The enclosure measures roughly sixty metres east to west and fifty-three metres north to south, bounded by a low wall of uncoursed limestone rubble, the kind of dry and irregular stonework that blends so naturally into the Cork landscape it barely registers as a boundary at all. What lifts the place out of the ordinary are its burial vaults: arched, mortared structures of the sort that wealthy families commissioned in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to mark their dead with something more permanent than a headstone, each vault here topped or accompanied by a chest tomb, a horizontal rectangular monument that sits above the vault like a stone lid over the whole arrangement.

The graveyard's deeper strangeness lies underground, or rather in its absence above ground. A parish church of Shandrum once stood within these walls, but by 1615 it was already recorded as being in ruins, and by 1694 it had in all probability vanished entirely, leaving no obvious trace. The church appears on the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, the great Cromwellian land census that attempted to document the ownership and geography of Ireland in exhaustive detail, which at least confirms something was standing in approximately this location at mid-century. The gravestones that survive date from the late eighteenth century onwards, meaning the community continued to bury its dead here for generations after the building they had gathered around had crumbled away and disappeared.