It is an active burial ground, still receiving the dead, which means it occupies that slightly unsettling middle ground between monument and working parish necessity.

The site is a rectangular enclosure bounded by a stone wall, with a more recent extension pushed out to the east, a common enough arrangement as older graveyards gradually ran out of room and had to absorb adjacent ground. Within the original enclosure, the headstones run from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth and into the twentieth, a fairly continuous record of the families who lived and died around this stretch of coastline. Among the simpler upright markers there are also chest tombs, which are box-shaped table monuments raised above the ground, and family vaults. The graveyard also contains the ruins of a church, the bones of an earlier building whose congregation eventually outgrew it or abandoned it for a new structure elsewhere, as happened in countless Irish parishes during and after the nineteenth century.

The harbour setting gives the place a particular quality at low tide, when the shoreline is exposed and the smell of seaweed carries up the slope. The stone wall and its eastern extension are easy enough to trace on foot, and the inscribed headstones repay a slow walk, especially for anyone with family connections to the Schull area.