What catches the eye, even on a map, is the shape of it: a kidney, irregular and organically formed, oriented roughly north-west to south-east across roughly 45 metres and 25 metres across its other axis. Graveyards of this kind, following the contours of older enclosures rather than any surveyor's geometry, often preserve the outline of much earlier sacred or settled ground beneath them.

The name recorded in English as Ollabrendan is properly rendered as Ula Bhreandáin, associating the site with Saint Brendan, the sixth-century navigator monk whose name is scattered across the western seaboard of Ireland in place names, holy wells, and old ecclesiastical enclosures. When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced, the graveyard appeared in that kidney shape it still broadly holds. By the time the second edition was published in 1898, the enclosure had already been extended northward, suggesting the community it served was still burying its people there through the nineteenth century. It continues to be used today, which places it in a particular category of Irish burial ground: not a ruin or a curiosity, but a living site where old ground and present grief occupy the same few dozen metres of Atlantic-edged earth.